Now I know what is love

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07X1FSFJL

Now I know what is love

Not the sudden passion

that turns off soon

and then rises again

Not even your eyes

May be sincere

But not eternal

Not your vain, fallacious promises

But the Word that never betrays

It’s true love!

 

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...

London for ever - 31

In the entrance, as we walked through the narrow corridor toward the large ground floor hall, I noticed in the backlight a bit of  smoke coming out, along with a soft but intense hustle of animation. The room had in the meantime been filled. Among the fans, as announced by the outdoor parking, there were numerous "motorcycle-rockers", also called "speedies" due to the frequent use of amphetamines, which they preferred among all drugs then in circulation for the particular charge they give them.  They were sold in slippers similar to cachet for the headache and nicknamed in London jargon "speeds". Their typical clothing consisted of robust boots, jeans, short-sleeved cotton t-shirt, and a jacket, also in black leather jeans, usually covered on the shoulders of small truncated-conical metal studs . Not so often, this eccentric clothing, coupled with their high stature, the black beards on which even longer blond hair lay apart, conferred on them  an aspect of metropolitan Vikings.

Nonetheless, these were quitter and more  peaceful than  the most colorful and folkloristic "punks" who  began to show themselves in  the second half  of the '70s, shocking with their appearances the London streets.

Even in the hall, the sight  had changed: a lot of young people were now knocking at the billboards, behind which many young barmaids were very busy  running  from one point to the other in the long counter, satisfying quickly the various requests of the many enthusiasts consumers.

Around the platform, now illuminated, with the musicians already on the stage giving the final touches to the instruments, sat in a semicircle a discreet crowd who was  waiting the music to start laughing and cheerfully joking between a sip of beer and a smoky.

Between the counter and the platform, in the middle of the room, other players had gone to the billiards and were playing  under the gaze of friends and enthusiasts. Above the pedestal, in the right wall, were now visible the sofas I had not noticed before.

I directed my friends straightly to the first floor through the large staircases that were already filled up with spectators, almost a natural queue of that crowd gathered around the footpath. Numerous compartment tables had been busy, and large shelves of beer and drinks could be  noticed up on theim.

Giampiero immediately understood the situation and thought well, followed by Michelle, to go back after asking what we intended to drink. We had seats at the end of the sofa at the back. From my place I saw a nice portion of the footpath, where an athletic  man wearing a black, adorable tights, with long and black hair ending in a thick tail, tried  the efficiency of the sound system with style cries of proof .

"How long have you been  staying  in London?" I asked Martine.

We took sit  on one of the dark circular stools that were scattered around the tables.

"Four months," she replied after a half-voice mumbled count, pulling out of the bag of strange, thin cigarettes from a brown and crumpled package.

- "And what are you doing, right here in London?" I insisted, looking at her as she whispered a voluptuous mouthful from  her strange cigarette.

- "I started a new job two weeks ago; I distribute female magazines at the Metro exit, but I hope to find something better; Also because, working twice a week, I do not earn enough, do you understand? "

"Do not worry," I replied half  serious and facet, in order to shed the sad and worry air that, as I later understood, was a mirror of her most intimate being, rather than a momentary mood .. "" You can join the great family of the street-traders and this should not make you feel alone, at least! "

- "But I do not feel alone at all!" She protested, always with her melancholy face.

- "You don’t miss Paris, then?"

"Certainly I don’t," Martine said in a convinced tone of voice- "I've run away from a boring job as a secretary; My parents are Baptists who observe and pretend to observe strict rules of life; Moreover, I had a boyfriend  who wanted to dominate me so bravely and possessively as never before. You know why I cannot have any kind of  nostalgia .......... "

- "How did you first arrive in London? - I asked her again after pointing to a distant guy who seemed to have come out straightly from the "Woodstock" movie, with a wide band that held her long hair and with numerous necklaces hanging on his neck on a pink shirt and a hallucinated look, fixed in vacuity while turning his hands open, slowly, as in trance, following with  the movements of his body, a music that only he had to hear.

Martine laughed, hiding her mouth with her hand before answering.

- "I turned to an au pair agency, and so I came to the airport. A family of teachers with two children, home in the greenery, at North Finchley, on the Northern Line, do you know? I had to work for  six days a week with them  always out and I at home watching children and eating, or rather not eating, the impossible English food. I  could go out only once a week and I had to come back early in the evening, before midnight.  Even  worse than my parents. Not to mention that I also had to clean the room and the stuff of the children! All for a wage of nine pounds a week. My friend Michelle got me out of  troubles ............ "

As evoked by Martine's tale Michelle appears from afar. Launches a festive cry, cuts the crowd  for herself and for Giampiero who  looks like an eight-handed equilibrist, a sort of goddess Kali. I try to help  Giampiero. I can get some bottles he  holds under his arms; he smiles to me on his  flaming face.

31. to be continued...

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...
If you want to read more of this please go through the link: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/edit-book/one?digitalItemId