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...

Freedom and Property

Of course London belongs to U.K., no question on it. But it's also true that somewhere in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed in New York in  1949, there is the right of human being to move to another County, wherever he likes. I'm not against order and policy. There must be a right to control (and a duty to be checked) in the frontiers of any country, but  to any many man should have given a chance to move to another country and demonstrate that Country needs his presence for a day or for a year or for ever. A man  cannot be sentenced to stay where he was born for all his life if he nees or if he wants to move. And each one of us must respect the people and the laws where he goes to.

To exit or no to exit

Yesterday, half a million  people, marched  in London against the Brexit.
I've already written in this blog what I think of this theme.
I love all UK, its people, its multinational culture, its different, strong tradition whatever they might decide to do on Brexit. Even if  they would be out of EU I would keep on loving and respecting their great democracy and their great Country.
Nevertheless I  hope that Great Britain remains in the European Union.
We need them as well as they need us to be together.
United Kingdom, English, Scottish and Irish people are part of Europe.
The European, different people, like English, French, Spanish, Italians, Germans, Danish and all the others, are like those cousins which have a common inheritance to share: it's better to find an agreement and keep on together.
We have already fight too much to conquer and manage on our own, exluding the others, the whole inheritance and it has been a disaster.
Who does not remember the cruel wars the ones against the others? How many have them been? I cannot even count them out since the Roman Empire has collapsed, almost sixteen centuries ago.
That's enough my  European friend.
I want we to stay together, with our differences, with our peculiarities, defending our own culture but sharing our friendship, building a new great Country to face the new millennial challenges against the giants of the world (I don't only mean USA, but also China, India and the others emergeing, dangerous  powers).
And I can't forget the sweet face of Helen Joanne Cox who has died for the European dream to be true.
Please, don't let her blood sacrifice be useless.
I embrace you, brothers of Albion. Do what you think is better for you but don't forget that together we'll be stronger. Europe is strong if we keep together though someone would prefer to split us.
The good things to joint are much more than those to break up.
And London is for ever, anyway.

The story of Mr Winningoes - 3

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 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 planned  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.

Going up again homeward, I stayed for a long time in Mexico, that not little fascinated me. By then,  I had satisfied my world's curiosity, so I preferred to  take over again my studies, more assidously  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, after another  short lapse of  time, in a great, bright revelation. I had realized, deepening on studies that any single subject lost, little by little, until vanishing, 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.

3. to be continued...
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The story of Mr Winningoes-1

“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, 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 started to the classical studies, but when I was sixteenth it happened something that changed radically the course of my life.

Without any apparent reason my father had withdrawn me from the College and the same day of my getting home, in a night of storm, I was embarked on a ship, “the Ulysses”, that anchored to 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 to the information that my destination would have been Boston 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 an outlet 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 craving, new lands! How many nights I cried, thinking about my mother, to 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 for me, 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 over a letter to me from my father on which he accounted to me 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 learnt 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:

“My gasp of liberty cannot hold up to the imprisonment between four suffocating walls “.

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 from that day! I cursed him, one hundred, thousand times, from that day and for the days to come! How was he been able to choose his stupid state’s reason against the love of a fragile and sweet creature as my mother? Why had he not embarked her with me to subtract her to the jailers? His king, then, was more worth than his woman on his heart?

1. to be continued...
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Memoirs of London - 17

17.

Another distinguished member of  the group was "Old Jerry", one who boasted of having left a leg in what battle I did not know well and proudly displayed numerous decorations of the British Imperial Wars of which he had taken part. He always greeted me happily and was the only one who always drank but good brand of whiskey.

One day, after I had not seen him around for a while, he told me that he had escaped from the "shelter", where some of his relatives had him locked up. He told they  had stolen all his  money and did not even leave him a small amount for a drop of wiskey and hence, as long as he lived, he wanted to live free to do what he wanted, after so many had seen and survived from; and significantly touching the prosthesis, limping but cheerful, he reached his companions who already called him from the benches in front, foretasting  in the throat a sip of good branded whiskey.

More mysterious was instead "Colby", a Welsh still distinguished guy, despite his  vagabond life was going on  for several years. It was said of him that he was in the service of the "Metropolitan Police". One morning a band of the "Salvation Army" passed through the square, with great sounds of trumpets, drums and songs praising the Queen, the national heroes, God Almighty and Divine Mercy, with the chiefs leading the march in high uniform, strutting as general, and in the queue the women volunteers,  with an angelic and inspired face, with the hair gathered in a cap, like so many nuns and the chest of drawers hanging on the neck with the inscription "thank you".

Colby had noticed the arrival of the Salvation Army just as he made his way to his favorite benches in the center of the square. It must have seemed risky to expose him to the square, because, like a hunted prey he took  refuge inside the room, hiding  behind the ice cream machine. Not seen, from there, he made gestures to the  joyous and glorious  parade, moving the index and the middle fingers of the right hand from the bottom upwards and then crossing them by way of an oath and pronouncing outrageous and unrepeatable phrases in their  regards.

 - "The last time they put their hands on me" - he told me as soon as he saw the danger escaped - "they even tried  to convince me that milk is better than my slop; but I told them, you know, I'm tired of being imposed and I do not want to be redeemed by them! Furthermore those kind of generals in the front are a bunch of sexual maniacs and the women on the rear do not even serve to suck my cock! "

17. 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...