Recuerdos de un Italiano en Londres-13

https://www.amazon.fr/Solo-como-una-piedra-Recuerdos-ebook/dp/B09Z6C5LKC/

Pero si Soho es el corazón palpitante de Londres de noche, el turismo es el gran negocio en el resto del West End: un gran centro comercial y comodidades en cuyas venas corre un río infinito de personas, motorizadas y con dinero, que atrae a un reemplazo continuo de nueva vida de las arterias invisibles del inmenso metro subterráneo de la metrópoli de Londres. La presencia de esta masa de plancton metropolitano había permitido en esas calles el surgimiento de una variada fauna de vendedores, incluidos los puestos de frutas, que se establecían principalmente a lo largo de Oxford Street. Sus frutos, tan hermoso y llamativo que parecian falsos, se destacaban más por la calidad y la forma que por la cantidad. Los "vendedores de fruta" en realidad vendían a los transeúntes, lo habitual para un "almuerzo rápido", o para turistas ocasionales, una manzana roja californiana, una "Granny Smith" sudafricana verdosa o incluso un pomelo siciliano, un plátano o , quizás, al más sofisticado, un avogadro cortado en dos mitades, provisto de sal y cuchara de plástico. Mientras que las pocas amas de casa o restauradores en la zona, que se encuentran en la calle Berwick cercana, encuentraban precios más baratos y mejores opciones. La "London Fruits Sellers Company" (de la que dependían estos vendedores de frutas en particular) era sin duda una empresa con todos los documentos adecuados: permisos de comercialización municipales; Licencia de ocupación de suelo público; tarjeta de seguro médico e incluso pagos regulares y sustanciales al Gran Socio Estatal: el voraz Fiscal de la Corona. La cumbre corporativa estaba compuesta casi en su totalidad de financieros judíos, eternos y expertos, siempre en busca de inversiones y ganancias, mientras que la organización en el campo, por así decirlo, estaba en manos de los ingleses. Todos los vendedores ingleses venían del barrio "East London", una ciudad en la ciudad, el mejor Londres, para aquellos que eran legítima y auténticamente londinenses.

La concentración en el este del Támesis de los descendientes de los antiguos habitantes de Londinium había ido junto con la expansión de la capital inglesa.

Expulsado hacia el este por la ampliación del núcleo antiguo de la ciudad (así como de Holborn, Seven Dials y Covent Garden), que se convertirá en los siglos en la rica milla cuadrada, desalojada del oeste para hacer espacio a ricos y lucrativos edificios, la gente más pobre de Londres encontró refugio cada vez más en el lado este de la ciudad, fusionándose con los descendientes de los hugonotes, los judíos, los romaníes y los ingleses más pobres de la actualidad, mudandose a Clerkenwell, Finsbury, Shoreditch, Wapping, Limehouse, Hoxton, Stepney, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, Shadwell, Aldgate, Millwall, Hackney, Rotherhithe, Mile End e Bow, que se convirtieron en otro Londres, el único real y original, en contraste con los ricos y turistas de Londres. Y mientras Harrod's, Selfridges, Marks y Spencer y los bancos más grandes de Londres estaban ubicados donde una vez ellos vivieron, encontraron refugio en el East End, lejos de la caótica y contaminada Nueva Frontera. Y cuando cruzaban esa cortina invisible que los protegía hacia el este, entraban en la "Ciudad" o la "Ciudad", pero Londres ya estaba detrás.

The real story of Patrick Winningoes-6

 

https://www.amazon.it/real-story-Patrick-Winningoes-Salvatore-ebook/dp/B0B244SFNQ/

At that question,  Mr Winningoes had set with extreme naturalness, George had brought a hand to his mouth, showing in his eyes an horrified gaze. Then he stood up, with the hand still on his mouth and ran out the room. I heard his long footsteps, through up the staircases.

-«I am sorry! I am very sorry indeed»– said the man 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.

 

- « May be it’s better if I go first to talk to him on my own! We need to stay alone for a while» I told Mr Winningoes.

-« As you like» – he said quietly, sitting again.

 

I followed George upstairs, thinking at Mr Winningoes’ story. I had also accused an emotional hit to that sorrowful question, although, to say the very truth, I had expected that point of landing in Mr Winningoes’ discourse.

 

I saw George coming out from the bath. He stared at me without saying nothing. I knew he needed to be on his own, so I went to our room and lay down at 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 had 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 unexpected, 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 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 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, in that same day that he told me of his passion 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The real story of Patrick Winningoes-5

 

https://www.amazon.it/real-story-Patrick-Winningoes-Salvatore-ebook/dp/B0B244SFNQ/

While I was trying to go further in what the man had told of his personal story he took back with sad voice to tell his tale.

 

«I apologize for talking in a such confused mess. Before continuing telling you of my son it would be better to resume what happened first. At the age of twenty one, 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 super-men able to drive on 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 the 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 disappointed bitterness, almost led me to abandon the whole project, it was the fate to intervene and to point out 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.

 

As 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 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 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.

 

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 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 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?”

 

 

 

 

The real story of Patrick Winningoes-4

 

https://www.amazon.it/real-story-Patrick-Winningoes-Salvatore-ebook/dp/B0B244SFNQ/

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.

 

Londres para siempre

Mi primera vez en Londres fue en el  1977. 

Hace mucho tiempo. Aún recuerdo el día en que aterricé en el aeropuerto de Heathrow.

 Fue quando  murió Elvis Presley. Recuerdo desde mi autobús, en el interminable camino de una sola dirección que me conduciría a la estación Victoria (según el  boleto de mi autobús), la marcha de los seguidores en honor del cantante  de Memphis. 

Tenían en sus manos signos de su ídolo: "Elvis nunca morirá" o "Elvis para siempre", "Todavía vives en nuestros corazones" y cosas por el estilo.

Yo era un joven lleno de esperanza y pena, en ese momento. Iba a Londres a olvidar un amor no correspondido; o tal vez solo estaba buscando algo que aún no había encontrado.

En ese momento, había abandonado los estudios de mi universidad, sin dinero, sin trabajo, sin amor. Solo como una piedra sola puede ser.

No había sido realmente muy aficionado a Elvis; seguramente mucho más a  Jimmy Hendrix; Elvis era un mito demasiado controvertido a mis ojos; un gran cantante, por supuesto, no diría que no; pero a veces me sentía como si hubiera sido explotado por la industria exitosa estadounidense; ese tipo de negocio capaz de crear (y también destruir, si ellos quisieran) cualquier tipo de mito, cualquier tipo de estrella; '¿ya sabes? Esa clase de víctima del star system americano  como Marilyn Monroe o James Dean. Yo era bastante crítico del capitalismo en ese momento.

Pero, de hecho, ya tenía demasiados problemas por mi cuenta para criticar cualquiera cosa.

Yo solo tenía una dirección en mi bolsillo, de un amigo que había ido previamente a Londres y con quien estaba en contacto. A través de este amigo, me presentaron en un supermercado italiano, en King's Cross Road. Recientemente he estado allí. Donde estaba la tienda, ahora solo queda una insignia, cubierta de polvo.

Encontré buena ayuda allí. Un amigo del dueño, un buen tipo Marchegiani que vendía jamones italianos, queso y otra comida italiana especial, me encontró un trabajo en una fábrica de pizzas, en algún lugar de Farringdon Rd. Y George mismo, me refiero todavìa al tìo Marchegiani, me encontró un lugar para dormir: una habitación en Keystone Crescent, a la vuelta de la esquina de su tienda, donde me cobraron 5 libras por semana, mientras que en la fábrica mi primer salario eran buenas 40 libras semanales.

No estába nada  mal para un principiante.

1. continùa...

Memoirs of London - 13

CHAPTER II

TOMMY

13.

Tommy belonged to the old guard of the Italians in London.

He worked illegally and at the same time he perceived the weekly unemployment allowance which officially was due  for being fired from the factory where he had previously worked.

But  according to his personal opinion it  was instead a form of reimbursement of the taxes paid in those years.

 Afterwards, he sentenced, in a society like the English, where a pair of gloves for fox hunting cost a hundred pounds (that he was more or less how much he earned for a selling mirrors for a month in the street ( inclusive of  Saturdays and Sundays) is not surely up  to the proletarians like him make economy.

Moreover  he had to defend himself in some way from the inflation invented by bankers and masters to exploit the working class.

 And since the escalators in London were only in the subway, he defended himself by perceiving that little government aid that, coupled with the variable payroll of the mirrors, allowed him to live quietly.

Tommy (as they called him in London, but his real name was Tommaso) was a bourgeois guy, of those who, in the eyes of the majority, could  never justify their anxiety or their dissatisfaction in the society.

High, long-limbed, and with regular facial features (I admired him and a little envied him for the ease with which he attracted the women’s gaze) Tommy  was endowed with a willing and determined character that, combined with his affectionate and altruistic charisma, instinctively wore you to love him,  well despite some of his contradictions which himself  was unable to explain and  which he did not even realize.

 But the latter thing was a common trait of  the generational movement which I also belonged to.

He had left Rome in the early seventies, when the dream of a more liberal society had already been broken on the barriers of respectability  and bourgeois hypocrisy. So, disappointed by the betrayal of that working class in whose union he, activist of the student movement, had blindly believed; still overwhelmed by that youthful rage that in the ideal years of '68 had released the highest vital energy; shocked, unbelieving, that the bloody boom was just the outbreak of an air bubble rather than the first crunch of the fatal collapse of a weary system, to be cut off at all costs; with the desire to forget and to find the more than ever living animosities of emancipation; driven by the fascinating cultural appeal of the new frontier of the movement, which in the shadow of the Big Ben sought refuge and regeneration in those years where the instances and the search for a new identity of a restless and shaky West seemed to find, if not an answer,  at least a reverberation of hope and ransom in the crises and illusions of Oriental myths, of which the capital of the former British Empire for its past colonial and vocation constituted the ideal and secure outpost; uncertain, helplessly and  confused, he was  passively dragged into London by one of those energetic currents, as mysterious and inexplicable as invisible and uncontrollable that impetuously are capable of dragging the fate of whole peoples and nations.

- "Ciao," I said, getting  behind him from a narrow alley.
- "You bloody scared me," it was his lusty response.

- "Excuse me Tommy! You were so overwhelmed that I could not resist the idea of ​​a joke. How are you?

- "Well, well .... And you? Did you find a job at last?

-"Yes I did! A company for which I have worked in the past has promised me to summon me ..... maybe next week ....! Do you know those machines that turn milk into cream, hang on by souvenir shops along the streets ...? "

- "Ah, yes, I seem to have noticed them, sometimes. Tourists seem to be crazy for them, don’t they?

-" surely they do! But also British seem to like them a lot.
- "Then it is even better! How much  do they pay you? "
- "I  work a 10%, ‘you know?"
- "And how it comes weekly?"
-"I do not know! It depends on the position! There at Oxford Street there would be a lot, but I will not be sure of that! Given my past experience, however, I could also have a good pitch! Ihope well...
- "I have spoken to my boss anyway! I was waiting for you to call me at home ... "
- "Yes, I called you, but you didn’t seem to be there..."
-"Didn’t I?! When did you call? "

He always spoke in a calm, almost indifferent tone, as if his words were the story of other people, not his owns. That day I felt in his voice an unusual emotional thrill.

- "I called a few days ago. Then I knew about the ice creams would take me back and I did not try again…’ you know? I just came to say hello to you! “

He  smiled slightly, seeming to regain his indifferent air as usual.

- "What did your boss say by the way?" I went on.
- "He said the place is available for you"

- "well I'm glad hearing it; thank you. Anyway,  I try in the ice cream now; Later, if they do not give me good wages, I might be asking them .... "

- "As you like! Do not worry, the work here is easy. And then maybe you'll take my place. Here is good enough ... "

- "How are you leaving?"
- "I’m going back to Italy"
- "Do you go on holiday?"

- "No, not on vacation. I'm meditating a more challenging step, a more important choice. Here in London I just broke. Think that yesterday the police broke into the house while there was no one and when I came back I found all my stuff out of the door ... "

-"Do not tell me! Another certainty of London that crumbles .. "

I was genuinely sorry for that news, not just for my friend, but for the fact in itself. I paid five pounds of rent for my furnished room on Caledonian Court Road, but I had always been fascinated by these free-lance communities that in  London were called  squatting houses, because, according to my way of thinking at that time, it was more appropriate to occupy unlived  houses that let them empty and lifeless.

At that time, I only considered the sociological and cultural aspect of the squatting phenomenon without worrying about the economic aspect, especially from the point of view of the owners of the houses .
Anyway, so things were going to happen, even if the situation was  to change seriously very soon.
- "Bloody Hell," Thomas continued, "only last year they would not be allowed to do such a thing! Crushing a squatting! "
- "I heard that they were about to issue a new Squatting Act .... do they have already done it?"
-"No I do not think so. I would have known if they did. The Conservatives are still on  the opposition but  they are getting stronger ... "

Again I noticed in her wards  that unusual emotion.

- "Where are you living  now?"
- "I have sheltered in the house of friends, in Fulham; They are organized; There is always someone at home and if they all leave, especially in the evening, they leave the lights on. And even the houses on the side are occupied by squatters: families of unemployed workers, poor devils. There they will not dare to break through …"
- "So you're okay, right?"
- "Yeah, maybe it was all there!"

He stared heavily in my eyes as if he were considering the importance or the opportunity to continue talking. I supported her gaze, then I offered one of my cigarettes. He continued after breathing smoke into the sky.

- "But tell me what am  I still doing  here? I'm bursting, ‘you know? I do not even remember what I  came here for and what's worse, sometimes,  I do not even remember who I am! My life, my thoughts, my actions are so different since I live here! Who is the real Thomas, do I ask to myself? It was only yesterday that I fought, albeit naively, to change society and  today I’m living  in a cloud of illusions, in a space which  I don’t even know the course? "

His unusual tone lit up my congenial polemic force and as I could, I tried to face him, also because, although he did not know the course, as he said, I felt I had to continue my journey; moving forward and without turning back.

- "Movement always follows a course, in my opinion! We need  to wait! We are in a moment of stasis; Soon clouds will light up! ...

- "No! Enough it’s  enough!" He  interrupted me abruptly, "I want to go back to earth, I have to tie myself to my past, to my true story! And, by the way,  what movement are you talking about?"

13. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 10

Other street vendors were the papers sellers.  They also came almost exclusively from East London but it was very rare to find young people among them. They worked outdoors all year long, occupying the corners at the exit of the most important metropolitan stations, using some of the simple metallic box inside which the newspapers were and, sometimes,  a table with metal chair, and from there emitted some incomprehensible sounds that merged with the drafters  coming from the bowels of the earth, through the infinite meanders of the subway; and in those sounds one could no longer recognize the names of the heads of the daily newspapers Evening Standard and the Evening News, which they pronounced in a short,  deformed by habit, similar to the rattle of a wounded beast, to attract the  attention of the distracted and hurried passengers in transit to the entrances of underground tunnels. The Evening News was actually just an imitation of the most famous Evening Standard. The latter was published in multiple editions from seven a.m. until late at night, with a frequency between  two and three hours. From one issue to the other, only the first page was changed in order to attract the readers to brilliant news. It was distributed to such vendors with a truly fantastic delivery network.

The delivers came in black-yellow van, and from there, with the engine still on, without descending from the van,  they flown the  newspapers packages.

The Evening Standard did not have a precise political physiognomy (at least not in the sense that we Italians give it to this expression) and perhaps it alternated its ideology tuning  with the political parties ruling  the largest London administrative body: "The Great London Council ".

All those vendors gave me a strange impression: that they had always done  that job. Not only for the wheeze voice that characterized them, but also for their very dirty clothing. The skin of their face looked   dark, almost dirty, because of the exposure to the unhealthy air.

 It also seemed to me that they felt  always cold, even in the summer, as if in their bones it was penetrated the humidity and the chilling breath of the freezing drafts coming from the Tube.

 They wore gloved handcuffs in order to easily grab money and newspapers and warmed up with a tea-milk cup they bought take away from the nearest snack bar.

Despite  of their appearance, which in the days of intense fog blended with the surrounding landscape, becoming a characteristic element, like the red royal columns of the Royal Mail, the telephone booths and the black cabs, the sensations they conveyed were, however positive.

 I do not say they were cheerful, but may be jovial. A serene and resigned joviality, as if the diffusion of the events, from London and the whole world, contained in their newspapers, made them impermeable to emotions, placing them above the human events, as if they were impartial messengers  from the underground’s gods.

When passing by, where I was working, they never lacked to nod at me with  sympathy, at the same time giving making a sound which wanted to be  an "are you all right " but one could only hear a  hiss, like the wind that had entered into their bodies, consisting of three, perhaps only two syllables, veiled, almost died  in the throat.

10. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 9

9.

One of them, who used to work in the ice cream sell, was Bob, who had made me an instructor, a few years earlier, in the short period of previous work placement: in particular cleaning and maintenance of the machine, and preparing ice creams and ice drinks.

He wasn’t  very tall (you would say surely more than five feet but less then six, with light hair, combed with a line-centered brush;  his eyes were green colored and very  moving on the features of the face, made a bit irregular by two slightly pronounced upper incisors.

 At the left lobe, with a lot of naturalness, he carried a small round gold earring, fashion, which on our country  was still beyond to come. His clothing was both simple and well-groomed. Particular attention, however, he showed on  the shoes and the t-shirts, on which, usually stood out of immeasurable, numerous gold chains, different in appearance and size, as our women do when they wore  the  ancient folk costumes.

Bob was definitely nice. Very uneasy, he was always around in the nearby shops, he was a jumper, or a grocer's colleague. In his "pitch", which was usually the most profitable, he had during the high season one or more aides on whom he uploaded, in a casual and good manner, most of the workload. When it happened to be in distribution, at peak times, sometimes he was bizarre.

Once, for instance, there was an  orderly and long queue of customers waiting to be served at  the ice cream machine,  up to the outside edge of the sidewalk.

Suddenly Bob said  he had to go and make a  phone call. And so saying, he showed customers a ten-penny coin, holding it high between the thumb and index finger of the left hand and hissing, with the upper lip slightly curled on the teeth, in a string of  glottis shots : "I'll be back in a minute!”.

After he had  disappeared into the store I tried to do my best on serving the customers. When he was back, seeing so many people still queuing,  he asked me kindly,

to set aside, tracing  a semicircle with his left forearm and grabbed a dozen cones, he was able to fill them all by turning his hand skillfully under the ice cream faucet, simultaneously driving the lever with his right hand, and while I was struggling to get ice cream in both my hands, to distribute them, the customers, cheered him up with admiration.  And it seemed that these customers had the magnitude, because there were more and more behind them, and Bob's show was repeated until the machine could keep on refrigerating.

But when he stayed away for a longer time he used to ask me, with a significant gesture of the index rubbed on her thumb, if

I had any  banknotes, which he called in his funny slang “wonga”.

It was at that time of my first novitiate in London that I started to love the English.

 If he did not have customers, he read the newspaper: The Sun, the Daily Mirror and, above all, the Evening Standard, a London daily newspaper that published everything about horse racing, the other sporting events of the day, as well as some local, political issues and seldom  internationals.

He did not read much concentrated or for a long time, since he looked up from time to time to whistle or recall the attention of some glamorous girl of passage, on the goodness of whose forms we did not always agree, and if I tried to drag him to comment on some political news or abroad eco-social argument, its responses were always superficial, albeit not evasive.

At first I noticed a certain surprise in his eyes when listening carefully to my reasoning, and I did not know how to interpret it.

As time went by, I realized that it must appear unusual and even bizarre to him  that an Italian  ice-cream seller , wanted  to deal with arguments that not even the English and the Londoners , like he was, would to be  interested on.

 So, though seen as a sort of  phenomenon, a bit funny and original, I realized that his attitude towards me went gradually changing, from the initial snobbery and indifference into a cordial, sincere sympathy  that I was not able to turn into a deeper friendship, perhaps also because of my immaturity and insecurity.

Bob and the other dealers, including his two brothers and a sister, had left the school shortly after they had solved their attendance obligations; indeed, many even before that term.

Rebellious and refractory to the harsh rules of the English teachers, they preferred the free life of the street; without hierarchical supervisors invading or rebuking and  without any form of obligation (it was not rare he changed bad  words with some overly demanding or unfortunate customer).

 And with a great pay over the average earnings of workers and employees.

9. to be continued... 

Memoirs of London - 8

But if Soho is the pulsating heart of London's by night,  tourism is the real great business  in the  rest of the West End: a huge shopping mall and amenities in whose veins runs an infinite river of people, motorized and money which draws a continuous replacement of new life from the invisible arteries of the immense underground subway of the London metropolis.

The presence of this mass of metropolitan plankton had allowed in those streets the emergence of a varied fauna of sellers, including the fruit ‘s stalls, which were set mostly along Oxford Street.

Their fruit, so beautiful and flashy to look fake, stood out more for quality and shape than for quantity.

The "fruit'stallers" actually sold to the passers-by, usual to quick "lunch-time", or to occasional tourists, Californian a red apple, a greenish South African "Granny Smith"  or even a Sicilian grapefruit, a banana or, perhaps, to the most sophisticated, an avogadro cut in two halves, provided with salt and plastic spoon.  While the few housewives or restaurateurs in the area, found in the nearby Berwick street market cheaper prices and better choices.

The "London Fruits Sellers Company" (from which these particular fruit sellers were dependent) was certainly a company with all right papers: municipal marketing permissions; Public land occupation license; Health insurance card and even regular and substantial payments to the Great State Partner: the voracious Fiscal of the Crown.

The corporate summit was almost entirely made up of Jewish, eternal and skilled financiers, always looking for investments and profits, while the organization on the field, so to say, was in the hands of the English.

The  vendors all came from the neighborhood "East London", a city in the city, the ultimate London, for those who were legitimately and authentically Londoners.

The concentration in  the east of the Thames of the descendants of the ancient inhabitants of Londinium had gone along with the expansion of the English capital.

Pushed away to east by the enlargement of the ancient core of the city (as well as from Holborn, Seven Dials e Covent Garden), due to become in the centuries the wealthy square mile, evicted off the west to make space to rich and profiting buildings, the poorest people of London found shelter more and more to the East side of the town, merging with the offspring of the Huguenots, the Jews, the Romani and the already settled poorest English  people and so moving to  Clerkenwell, Finsbury, Shoreditch, Wapping, Limehouse, Hoxton, Stepney, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, Shadwell, Aldgate, Millwall, Hackney, Rotherhithe, Mile End e Bow which  all became another London, the only real and original one, in contrast to London’s rich and tourists.

And while Harrod's, Selfridges, Marks and Spencer and the largest London banks were located where once they lived, they found refuge in the East End, far from the chaotic and polluted New Frontier. And when they crossed that invisible curtain that protected them to the east, they entered the "Town" or the “City”, but London was already behind. 

Bulwark and  symbol of the identity of this people was, still at that time,  the Cokney.

It is a real English dialect, though it has lexical borrowings from Yiddish,  and a distinctive accent that features T- glottalisation, a loss of dental fricatives and diphthong alterations.
This slang, which is said to bear more than one trace of early English London speech, acts as a linguistic element of group identification where the East Londoners find  their emotionally primary language, a true mother tongue.
 The other  English find it  very funny, a bit like it happens to the  Italians  when they hear  the colorful Roman dialect of certain comedians, from Ettore Petrolini onwards. Also in my company were several of these "East Londoners". 

8. to be continued...