The Dreamer: a romance of madness and love

 

 

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CQDFK2JW

Chapter 8

How had succeeded, that strange old man, in transporting those visions down our sights, below the windows? The same visions I had still in my mind, being so fresh and real, we had just lived right that Friday of 9th November 1979 I was relating to!

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 nose was spaced out slowly, as absorbed and diluted in the immensity of the surrounding silence. Turning around several times, after an indefinite time, that desert of dry leaves seemed to stop against an iron handrail.

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 block red-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.

 As we went down the stairway, the view, under us, revealed his real contours.

That poster, that seemed to me like suspended in the air from my previous point of view, 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.

To find the access of the yard that occupied a wide place in the center of a crossroad, we walked for a half along his perimeter. The thick tables that bounded it were interspaced by half an inch, around through numerous working machines were glimpse: diggers, shovels, concrete mixers, kneaders, all firm, as dead animals, in the most total silence.

The entrance was exactly on the opposite side of the inn from where, for the first time, I had perceived the pylon of the crane. We reached it, after a quick and silent walk. Between working machines and shovels, heaps of sand and piles of sacks of cement, bricks, lumber, 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 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 for 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 it. There are good hopes. Follow me into the office, please» -, he spurred on, seeing us so undecided.

The office looked like a building field. As matter of fact inside there were numerous buckets full of hammers, chisels, pickets, water levels, trowels and other mason utensils.

Once inside, Mr. Joking (that was the name he had introduced himself, asking us in turn our names) immediately passed beyond a desk loaded on with papers, different samples of colored tiles and some minute utensils. He scrutinized us for a long while.

« Where do you come from?» He asked after a careful examination, dissuading his look.

«From Italy» George promptly responded, preceding me.

We seemed to overcome his examination, because he smiled in a satisfied way.

«Here is your agency’s address» he said after scribbling some lines on a piece of paper, - «and good luck!», added while handing the note to George!

We had not even had the time to read it that we heard a strong aloud voice:

«Old Pat doesn't stand people pronouncing his name and that of his Agency in a wrong way and above all he doesn't bear to be told any lies. If you do it, you won't have any job from him».

Then, turning to Mr Joking he added:

«Sir Patrick the Hanger Winnin’goes again, doesn’t he?» Only later on we had to realize that the big man we saw rudely laughing, turning a look back on our shoulders, was not misgiving English language at all, as he willingly wanted but to stress the wrong verb, like he really did.

George stood perplexed, with the note in his hand, now looking at the big man, who was still laughing, now Mr. Joking, who seemed rather embarrassed than enjoyed.

I walked closer when I saw him reading the note. On a single line the note said:

"Pat Winningoes - Gehenna Geld", and nothing else.

«Strange names, the last two. They sound quite German», George exclaimed in a low voice.

«He has not even put the telephone number. Shall we ask for it?» I said.

«We might take a look for it on the telephone guide. Still if it really does exist»,

George murmured. putting the note in his pocket while sorting out the cottage. We walked out without even greeting, with fast and nervous footsteps. Before reaching the exit of the yard, nevertheless, we heard a man’s call.

« Hey, wait a moment, please!», Mr. Joking came rushing slightly breathing towards us.

«Do not pay attention to Big Joe, please! He is a joker» he added gently, smiling like he had made the first time, with a tone of reassuring voice.

«Come over with me, please» , he said, driving us over the exit.

«You cross the road in that direction and take the avenue you have in front; then, taking the third street on your left, that can’t be wrong, you will see a big door in dark wood. There is the agency. Go in….. and...... good luck»!

He had spoken all of a breath and in such a convincing way that we had already forgotten Big Joe and his strange former laughing. The avenue that Mr Joking had pointed us, was really the third crossroad on the left. It was a blind, wide and short alley.

At the bottom a massive dark wood doorway was standing out, occupying all the breath of the street..

More than the entry of a job’s agency, it seemed to be the entrance of a rich and luxurious residence. A few steps in marble lead to an extraordinarily glimmering atrium, to whose sides were risen, also in marble, two mighty columns.

George, walking the steps, almost was very close to stumbling. He restored his equilibrium immediately, murmuring an annoyed "My goodness!" and looking on the bottom of his shoes, like searching for the cause of the accident.

The wind was blowing more insistently, and formed in the alley a strong eddy, violently shaking above the front door a rectangular poster which was bestowed with some scotch tape, held out against the wind on a unique side. With my right hand I stopped it on the front door. We read there, in a clear handwriting and cursive characters:

"London Trickery and Illusion Centre."

«But where the hell did they send us?» said George looking at me.

«I do not know!», I answered, releasing the side of the poster, which retook immediately to wave.

«They made a joke of us, those two braggarts!», I told him with an angry voice. Then turning to my companion - «Didn't we make a mistake by wrongly counting the road crossings?», I said returning back on our steps to check in.

«Come soon to have a look, please!», cried George in that while, with an excited tone of voice.

I quickly returned to my footsteps and drew close to him. With the right hand he stopped the poster on the front door and surprisingly I could read on it this time - "Pat Winningoes - Geenna Geld Agency - 1st Floor."

«What devil of history is this? »-, I told George, who was looking at me in a mocking way, with the right hand still fixing the poster on the door.

-« The history is all here» , he answered. And with emphatic gestures as a conjurer who discloses an amazing trick to the public, he turned the poster from one side to another, showing the different writings we had read on it just a little before. I turned it a couple of times, to make myself convinced, while George was already pushing the other half of the front door.

to be continued...

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

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CQDFK2JW

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.