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Saracen
The last time that I saw the turning puppet goes back to some month ago, in March, when they went to dust it a little to get it ready to novelty great engagement in June.
In the dark room its eyes seemed those of Belzebù in flesh and blood, or better, in hard wood or pot of garden, like the statues of the ancient villas where there are still babies to amuse.
It could seem a scarecrow for starving ravens of grapes and cherries, because the ravens do not eat only meat, they are greedy also of sweet things, and the blood is sweet.
The two keepers assigned to the maintenance of the Moor king every so often smoothed it delicately with a cloth like he was true thing, a Christian, but it certainly ever had not been, not even if before to paint to it those wide open eyes was been miraculous embodied.
It was a black devil, a saracen, with a big turban and big beard, dressed at the Eastern way.
In the ardour of the game every so often it lost its precious hat and it was rumoured that noone, when it was at rest, slip it off secretly, but meanwhile the turban was almost always set down to the end of the dark trunk, the body of the turning big puppet.
Naturally the keys of the secreta were in double copy for the guards who continuously took an oath each others, denying and denying.
The fact is that some mysterious visitor arrived in there rather. So much so that before one of the last contests an unknown hand repainted the eyes of the puppet in so realistic manner to seem they could get out from their orbits. Also the bust was less greenish, like if experienced to embody itself really, to take to walk and pursue its Christian enemies.
Usually the two keepers, after having spick and span it, leaned it into an angle, near an old window, in order to down on the ground floor they were able every so often to take a glance that everything was to its place.
They did not know exactly why they felt that weird need, but justified themselves with the fear of the thieves, of some unsuccessful antiquarian that wanted to take away the Moor to the public authority to sell it abroad smuggled and to make our pile.
Even though the whole building was provided of the most ingenious alarm systems, even of a siren that when flew off transmitted at high volume the prayers of the last gathering to The Mecca, inside that room never was seen a feather drop.
There was to the contrary a heavy silence that aroused embarrassment and fear.
Enough to make born around the monstrous fighter legends, stories, dreams.
One of them particularly had grip on the audience of the humble classes, but was not rejected with conviction even by the irony of the power and became common upsets of a whole Christian country.
Among the high-ranking classes an appropriate confraternity was born that gathered periodically to talk about the state of the turning puppet and to supply to maintain it just in the same way. It is now time to explain the reason.
The legend narrated that Satan very venerated in any tournament like dangerous enemy, not always had been a stump of wood, even though quite worked, but a normal saracen, with fine legs and foots, not open arms as a scarecrow, with younger outlines, but always simply as a disfigured face to spit over the crusaders.
As were possible a fact so amazing, ask it to the black magic, the same one from where breed themselves these puppets of today, exhibited only in the country quintane.
It is written of a remote past in which our saracen lived hidden in an out-of-the-way place of the uncivilized world, I mean not civilized, after having killed many crusaders inside high towers, mistaking them for those of Sodom and Gomorra.
Exchanging also for crusader every man breathing man. It was rumoured that was its god to reduce it in this way, to punish it of its mistake, but that the punishment was temporary, not eternal, and that it has been then turned like before.
The centuries passed fast and by now likely the trouble, and the big danger for the Christians and not.
The confraternity judged imminent the new transformation. And if then the wicked repeated its misdeeds, not caring a rap to be still the puppet? The risk could not be run. It was necessary to put our hands on the fugitive Saracen until it was still a puppet, to bind it like a salami and await the entire transformation.
The sad announcement to the population was given. Tournament was canceled for reasons of public emergency, not certainty because the turning puppet was no more at its place. It escaped, starting to tumble down for the roads.
Already the monster of a time had returned?
All they waited for, living those breathless days.
Europe - Italy
No, it is not true that I was always so greedy like my bank clerks say, a conservative profile. I became in this way, because here in Rome, the truth is that everyone ended their money, one way or another and even if they wanted, they had nothing else to pledge at the usurers.
There is some floweret who still goes around in Ferrari, pretending to be goodness knows who, but at 99% it is not true, he pretends with a car at tenth hand with bottomless engine to be in high spirits.
It is what this Europe theoretically invented by the retired presidents of banks is broken off like an egg basket and began to rot, to stink.
While I tell you this, I see a lot of German in visit to their fellow-citizen pope, and they too like French and English men and those from north-Europe eat bread, drink water from the fountain.
Something to go with bread is expensive.
Don’t speak about other Europeans countries since little time who don’t even open their mouth, they forgot it. And they stink of onions.
This is not something that consoles me a lot, because it does not put me in a good mood, although I feel like the odd person of the “stories from underground”.
I have no benefit to see housewives crying at the market store, in front of cherries and strawberries, tomatoes and squashes.
I lost my courage on the road, but one time I had it, rather.
I entrusted my savings to a weird bank clerk who did business by himself even against his bank. Finally he was kicked off and I ingenuously I followed him with all my savings, before giving him the sack and to save a little capital as best I could.
I started again calm and lively like a chaffinch, when the hell happened, and then another one and finally I had only small money.
A misery compared with the pile of mine carefully put out to amuse myself when I would be an old person.
Fault of these cock attacks that put in underpants me and whoever else pretends to be who is not in Europe.
Useless attempts those to scatter wherever the colours of the peace, to defend as hard as they can the murders like they were the last heroes to resist against supremacy of the United States, like they were sons of the revolution, of Marx, rather than of Hitler. The hunger that is left over has only one colour.
Rome, used to any type of scarcity equally has wilted, rolled up like a sick of oìdio leaf of lives.
There is not an antidote to the hate that those excited experience in our comparisons, anything but forgiveness.
I had a lot of stocks invested in those towers collapsed like card tears and I pecked the withdrawal of the bonds in the same day of the hell in the station of Madrid. Well, we rub along.
Having been an exemplary Italian, also I ran into the scandal of the tomatoes and in the one of the milk, in the crisis of the cars of state and in the failure of some fake bank.
I saw again at Pincio my former-bank clerk who act a bit queer as the way of Freud. He had two coronaries and got by as he could, trying to be a private financial consultant in the neighbourhood of Vatican. Perhaps to have a free dish of soup at banquet of the nuns.
This flat decline manages that many hate more who seeks a way to escape, than those who make blow up themselves anywhere.
I find myself often to have to suppress an impetus of rebellion, because it would be classified as racism towards the weak armed to the teeth.
We must accept anything, in this senseless Europe that is a stepping-stone for every throw of bombs or flowers, the same thing. The password is to smile and love like very foolish grandchildren of sons of flowers.
The business is going to pieces and some mason studious of the Arabic world chats and explains how to resolve the spiny issue, chats, explains, explains, chats. Get your throat dry up!
Empty pockets, equal stomach that stamps, brain without sugar, underground brain. Stocks in free fall, no business to take on the fly.
Equation
He had a large closet of white wood with renaissance paintings with the two central shutters as mirrors. He was full of griffed clothes, attractive in the shape, in the colors, a true capital that only someone privileged by luck or some true roguish allows.
By the side of the closet an enormous shoe-cupboard, unuseful to describe it too, because every clothing is assumed had the relevant shoe linked. And I do not say you how many perfumes and other were gathered in a mysterious order above the varnished bedside tables.
I found a travelling bag very roomy, one of those used in the films to throw down comfortably lots of banknotes just pinched in bank.
I found him, an indecent show, to say this I am, who has the nerve since thirty years for every type of obscenity.
It had been the stink of excrement, of vomit to alert the neighbours until my arrival.
The bag was empty, the perfumes did not suffice not even to soothe the unhealthy stench that was wherever.
I felt the urgent need to drink and to smoke, but not certainty in that kitchen.
I did not know how to resist in the middle of that loathing for a whole day.
As usual I played the role of the policeman psychologist and clever. It would be enough at least until the return to home.
If I passed my hands in front the person, he trembled, but did not emit any sound, not even inhuman.
Also I was quiet, looking not to touch anything, above all the shit, because it had been his ink on the ground and on great part of the wall.
I should have called for profession more experts and perhaps also a priest, but who knows why I didn’t do immediately and more passed the time, more I did not feel to do.
I decided to edit a personal relation, detailed that approached the most possible to a logic solution, and only after I would have entrusted that subject and that place to others.
In this way I seemed to gain the disgust and the enormous curiosity that awakened in me that rotten individual.
How could someone who has everything to be reduced in this way?
There are crazy men who kill, others who kill themselves for love, but a person who owns what everyone of us, more or less openly wants or envies to others for a whole life, no, cannot dirty himself in this way.
There are no justifications.
The few acquaintances who eyed in there since I set foot there, it was like they never knew him, perhaps he had carefully kept them at arms’ length before becoming so.
The computer transmitted me his personal data, rich people, classy, without need of working, without links, without friends.
Perhaps he started scribble the walls with the shit to give an explanation to the sudden genetic change from the clear to the darkness, from the everything to the most sullen nothing.
The expression of his face more than the one of a crazy, that seemed of someone visited by the aliens.
And the visit really arrived, that just seemed sent by the sky.
She was a pleasant woman one of those that know to treat even with people like the undersigned, a true lady, not only in the clothing. I do not hide your that it is one of the reasons why I am here to remember, otherwise it would be better not to think more and to care myself by what I saw.
The nice female told me she knew the man at a fair of the ancient book, at the department of story. in the middle a conference on the change of the systems of power from the medieval age to our days, he jumped on, screaming.
Immediately he was removed from the assembly.
What had he scream?
An equation, a mathematics formula, something like this, at least so seemed at the dismayed presents. The same marks traced on the walls.
11:11=X:0
X=11:11X0
X=0
Radar
I am a human radar motionless in the middle of the park. I pick up. Sometimes I fix my attention on something. First I remember I had been a curious child who played with “small chemist”.
Then a bad and black boy who did not do anything in particular, but listened from the morning to the evening to an infernal music, and in there found his outlets.
I do not know if they are the tablets they gave me for free in several rebuilding institutes to make me good, peaceful to the world I hated before. The last work I made is the one of the bearer of milk to the customers’ house, fresh milk just milked and wholesome for starving nice families.
Every morning I went around the district, ringing from door to door and everybody greeted me kindly by name.
After I took again the usual musical illness.
And this time they were less comprehensive.
God, what will have been ever to listen all volume, 24 hours on 24, my infernal music?
The problem is that the others did not want to know of it, because should do a lot of things. They engaged another milkman who not even ringed at the door, left the goods on the meadow and noone greeted him, they did not know even his name.
For a little one I went to live at my sister who was a tailor and closed me understairs, the most soundproofed point of the building.
I climbed above for hunger, between a song and another.
But unfortunately she, between a garment and another, she took to deliver less and less goods, the takings came down underground. My clatter passed across the walls.
Then, since she was a good-natured woman and did not want to pull me away, I flied off in the dawn, with my big radio in shoulder.
I did not know where to go. I started to follow a fat girl who maybe had a house, work and ate too much.
In fact she went to close herself for an hour in a market, to plunder any possible and imaginable filth. It made me want to vomit, but I screwed up my courage and pretended be interested to her, instead who could care?
She bite. I was able in last minute to push in its truck overcrowded of sweets and cookies, also some foreign beer and a beautiful steak, fish and cheeses.
The fat person took me at home and there left me, because she had to go to clean somewhere I do not know what.
I changed immediately the lock, switched on the big radio, closed the windows, without realizing I had taken house near my sister.
I phoned them, saying that I had a girl and I was well. Ingenuous.
It was the last thing I did as normal, then the void. I lost memory of how continued my life from that day.
I hardly remember my name is Rufus, or others gave me as nickname I do not know in what occasions.
Would I play sometimes?
I had no more the big radio.
Now I pick the signals of the life in the park, from my personal bench, wanting to chase a thought. I live of air, stretching out the ear. I am a radar. I am not still so old how it seems to the ones who look at me disgusted, shifting me.
And I listened to a great music, I ensure you.
I am pleased I saw great concerts, big youthful gatherings. Some person I knew around dead tragically, and I seem to see him running the park.
Now a young at time comes to look at the empty park, sadder than me who do not feel anything and I only take care of the warmth, of the cold, of the food, of the to drink. Bad business, Rufus.
Not even a friend to invent I had a life. I should recover the night, alone, at least a small part, before towards the dawn or back towards the evening. To buy me another big radio.
Funereal verses
They steal me the occupation. I am worried, because a time we were few to have a disposition for the composition of mortuary verses, of warm dedications to the dead or simply of lists of exhausted relatives by the pain for the loss of a dear relative.
You would understand that what I make is for passion, it has nothing to do with the Manifest that funereal agencies attach.
I am an artist of the funereal announcement, the most refined means to communicate the neighbouring world that the such one or the person left us in peace. I write in the daily printed and in net, and sometimes they ask me also a small public performance for wealthy private citizens.
I please to hear me the sound of my voice while I proclaim inescapable verses.
At a certain point of my shining career happened what never I would expect. A vertical sudden fall of request, like if the death of someone eminent, well known, did not interest anymore.
Supreme poets wrote that is necessary to respect the dead, and these are the things that happen nowadays, almost they don’t notice you on the happened deaths.
In the beginning of the crisis I phoned to a colleague with which I had funereal studies of writing and the course of improvement for sensitive hearts.
He was capable, enough popular.
I liked him, as we could like a rare animal. The envy was surpassed by the amazement that existed someone other besides me that loved the poetry of the dead.
We stayed to talk about the occupation, of the crisis, of our continuous sacrifices, for a whole day without understanding anything.
Until that Bertrand, it was his name, decided to ask aid to the society of the telephones where worked a wild boy that tapped him money continuously, asserting he was his son.
“It is clear that you have not the right mobile phones. Do not you receive funereal rings?”
And what kind of swindle were they? How did they make replace the ours pompous words of death?
The little guy made us buy two bluish mobile phones that every so often emitted an amusing light music with a ready message to read.
We could even look at it not at immediately, cause it drove at a short memory to empty continuously. Nothing else.
We had only a cast-iron stomach and the just mood to see what was the question, since at every gracious refrain corresponded a list more or less considerable of dead I do not know in what place of the world.
How many dead! Here, the people did not want anymore our artistic sentences. We had been climbed by the nude and raw statistics.
Many people enjoy betting money on the number of the victims, day after day.
The beauty of the statement is that it was about common people, common dead, faces that blew up, ended into pieces and face down singed in the attacks here and there around the world. A war that exploded every so often, invisible, underground, senseless.
The two bluish cells played gently more times in the day and then were silent discreet, leaving that the life of the actual listeners ran peaceful like always, like never existed a war.
And yet they dared it throw malicious notes in the heart of the night, in the middle to a fine dream, and when happened they became grey lead, with a little red light flashing threatened.
The war is approached, you are getting hot!
Cursed cellular! For their fault after a little someone could not anymore draw the remainder of the dead, like there were no other to conclude the life suddenly, killed random, that’s fate.
With my friend Bertrand we decided to throw away those idiot gadgets, to be totally unaware of the war, hoping that did not touch us ever nearly.
We founded the “Society of the good death and burial” to join the substances, to eat every day.
It is not prosperous, for goodness’ sake, but we do not complain ourselves. I am writing the funereal verses for a crippled dancer and a blind photographer.
Bertrand for two musicians without arms and a singer with a throat cancer.
Some request still arrives, even if they put us more and more in bottom to the net and the card of newspaper is by now object of antique business.
We sworn ourselves reciprocally friendship until the end. Who will die before will have his capable funereal verse made by the other one.
The last will be written by themselves.
We know what is the end, we wrote of it for a whole existence, but there are a lot who do not know anymore, because the death by now exists only if bizarre. To kiss a chicken on the beak, cooing with it like pigeons do and take from that a deadly flu.
I did it always as childhood with my chicken to train, bound to a foot with a long cord to make it rummage peaceful in garden between worms and flies.
The college
Someone says that one time it was a true school, with a lot of professors and lessons, books of paper and globes, but imagining it now is almost impossible.
If I feel myself alone, usually I shelter in a special room, small, comfortable, with a small chair and so low benches that they seem made for the inhabitants of Lilliput. It was the special class for dwarves provided of a great brain. From in there I hear clear all the mess that there is around, with girls that make up themselves for the television trailers and boys that crack the glass with balls, to make see they will become the new champions of the world.
There are neither teaching nor watching. Everything is left open, available, even the volumes bound in skin and gold sequin, after all it is not possible to gain currency, therefore they do not arouse any interest.
If I am in a right day, I read something secretly, then I replace it, because I do not want that the others have some pretexts to get rid of me or to deny me their company. At my age it is more than a simple necessity. Besides the course to appear as the best in television, are all the fashion the electric games and any circus sport that can be shown cash on delivery.
In this weird country there are a lot of colleges like this, isolated jealously by the remainder of the planet.
The net is inner, it is used only to write to the friends, to find places of appointment, to play.
In the other hand, it does not allow any type of search that is outside the same college.
To the utmost it goes you some financial office of the country, but after long, endless terrifies. That’s you regret the old queues in first person at the tax office.
God, never has seen a slower line of net, tedious. Between a connection and another you can work to crochet or cross-stitch, put enamel on your nails of the foots and of the hands, as much it dries quite pretty well.
And thinking that in the college the net is called “flash”. I call it “slug”. I sail with the slug.
To say the all, there are already news ready from months and months, information of every type, even cultural that last also a year, then they return back, renovated in the graphic garment. The same soup since I am at the college.
I have to be sincere. I don’t like neither television, nor soccer, I have not a special predilection for some sport. I do not care a lot of my physical appearance, taken like I am to pursue senseless omens.
However I strive to follow the courses in net of cinema, above all to see the actors.
They say that outside their country they are not the same, that nobody knows them, but try to demonstrate it.
With what? We know only them, that really are very weak, beyond that nasty.
But they are designated like actors, we cannot do anything. Also the game “invents the plot of a film”, after a little pesters, but is the only way to be chosen and to have house with pool, body guards, to boast around to gain a big advancement.
After a little, what a drag!
I would have money to leave the country, but they don’t let you arrive even to the boundary. Stop you first and take back you to the college.
Sometimes I think I am here in punishment, because I committed an offence, but is not so. Some schoolfriend of mine says that exist worse countries, where the persons do not go to the college, but to school of war to play who is more able to kill more people.
It does not comfort me so much, because I am quite aware of the place in which I find myself, a college destined to the extinction in the oblivion. I would have wanted to find the courage to cross the boundary, doing a leap in the nothing, just to experience.
Someone did. He was away for a little, came back, submitting to the worst courses to survive.
Drops make mince-meat of you.
The sons of the rich men of the ministry of the finances, they are well even at the college!
They do not do anything else than to organize parties, to telephone at any time, to photograph themselves, to shoot themselves at the pool while dancing, singing. What a boredom, think about.
After a little I would have a change of air. Instead those end their existence behind their friends and the most bizarre cell alarms.
Some girl does nothing else than to try dresses, organize absurd diets, enter and go out from the shops, finding it very amusing. What a yawn!
The girls are so envied, courted.
Someone is ugly, but everyone find her attractive, elect it miss here and miss there. So life goes on at the college.
Out of here, in the rest of the country, it is even worst.
Well, we just manage to get along, pretending to amuse and study something of important. Who knows how was the college a lot of years ago, if ever it was a place longed for, admired in the world.
Interviev
Four of July of 2000 I received a request of interview. In the beginning I was incredulous, it thought about a joke, and since I have not a lot of attendances, to a joke by some stranger.
However there was a precise address on the envelope, written delicately with ball-point pen, a little faded, like had been long time exposed to the sun.
And instead it came from the moon.
Someone carefully had closed the pale blue envelope, like sealed up with cement, because in the beginning I doubted to be able to open it without breaking it into pieces.
To the end I decided to wet it a little, risking not to be able to read it anymore. Instead it opened like for magic under my damp fingers, like if it did not wait for other.
A person who resided in the centre of the moon since a lot of time wanted to interview me.
He did not specify the why and the wherefore of his interest in my comparison, but did me big compliments for my work, like if there I were a celebrity.
Except but after admitted he was only an employee to the predictions of the lunar time, he was bored, having as only his amusement to open and close the windows of his house according to the big warm and the big cold.
Curiously he did not specify like and from whom he had my writings, and if the interview was exclusively for him or for others.
But what others, if he lived confined in that romantic satellite? He sent off me a sort of questionnaire in insaltments, that I should answer as I liked in the current year, anyhow the next questions would arrive in the next year, about in the same date of the first ones.
He did not specify eventual notes or where they would have gone, but promised great things, until to the end I believed and took seriously the engagement to answer and to let interviews also later on.
I had nothing to lose and everything to earn.
My curiosity was such that I was beside myself with joy for the desire to answer and to do questions me too.
So it was. I have a fierce reader on the moon, who perhaps spreads around I don’t known where, what I think and write.
Poor man! He ended up there after his bank sent him to the hell. A bank that to be left open in legal manner stole the money of its employees and the most moneyed customers without giving any explanation.
At the trial came out a pandemonium, and in the middle of that mess noone understood anything, noone went in prison, but the ones who had no more money killed themselves or went to be in another place of the planet.
And it was the case of my secret admirer, who since long time wanted to go to the moon.
During that black period, by mere chance in the middle to the park he found the rough draft of a story of mine on the moon and the stars since to save I write on the notebooks that the bank gives for Christmas, my address was noted there.
Thanks to an old diary thrown into the basket, I had finally a reader, an admirer, an interviewer, all in a time. I was enough satisfied.
I began with care to answer the questions, continuing with enthusiasm year after year, until no more news came from the moon. Perhaps my moment of pride was ended, perhaps the little man was dead dried up in the middle of the silver.
Then a night arrives a postcard illustrated ringed everywhere of dark blue and yellow from Saturn, where another interview was asked by me. By now I am well-known in the solar system, and I want to tell you what I answered to the hail of questions that from satellite to planet to star, my space little men sent to me.
To the too personnel questions I did not answer completely, creating around me the halo of mystery that have the old stars of the American cinema.
I wrote I had seen some nice things, many really indecent for this life.
Without being pessimistic, the world that had gone forward a lot, at a certainty point had a big braking that had blocked its gears. How to make them start again?
Since many years they experienced it in the most disparate manners without succeeding.
Someone, playing the philosopher said it was inevitable, that it already happened in the past that on the earth, to a prosperous and enlightened period, followed a stagnation towards the dark periods. But since I am little farsighted and I occupy myself of the time in which I have granted my breath, I did not see but the incapability to put right the damage. And I was gotten angry for the handful of years that someone arbitrary had surely make less beautiful.
Caprices of a childlike artist, attached to his existence, to his selfish body.
And yet for the ones who escaped towards the solar system I have been and I am still now a daily fun that comes from the saddest planet, the Earth.
The exorcist from Arezzo
In the appearance he seemed more like the monster of Florence than an any priest, but he was considered a big healer in all the region. His shrewd skill plowed in short time the national boundaries, and every morning, immediately after he had officiated to the sacred functions, his diligent secretary drafted him the list of the secret visits. Oh yes, because what the priest doctor made after the Mass of the day was carefully performed furtively, in the new sacristy recently annexed to the ancient church in restoration.
Mixed to the tourists in front of the secondary entrance of the church, since the dawn mysterious emaciated visitors went around, in watchful wait.
It was forbidden to enter from that side, after the woman marked the hours for the appointments.
More than one time an ill sexton on the wheelchair chased the curious tourists in wicked manner, closing violently the door then reopened delicately, leaving it drawn near for the patient on shift.
Our priest, great big strapping as he was, feared to be raided from one of his paying visitors, as moreover already happened in past, at the beginning of his parallel career, when a demoniac more seriously ill than the others had bitten his neck like vampires do, and another one still, overwhelmed by rapture, branded him on the cheek with an iron, causing a sort of bluish smallpox.
He protected himself with the tools of his job, but he was feared.
After all he was more than justified, because he did not remove teeth, he extracted the devil.
Someone went there convinced to be sick of cancer or of another dangerous illness unknown by the official medicine, but it was always the same tune. The devil had a hand and he needed to kick it in wicked way.
In Vatican ingenuously they continued to say that the cases of diabolical possession are rare and hardly ascertainable, but our priest, also from the simple wrinkling of the skin around the eyes becoming sunk, saw clearly his enemy.
Useless to say that in the last years the number of the possessed was increasing incredibly, like the devil had increased with some medieval potion its capacity to penetrate the human, while the modest possibility of care, the antidote, was in the hand of the usual cowardly priests little supplied.
The exorcist from Arezzo had simply his hands, this is why he was called the healer. For him it was a matter of skin.
The devil took the skin, yellowed, cracked, burnt it and finally reduced it to pulp.
Here, he should cure across the skin, touch it, massage it, stretch it, give back it again healthy and color. When the massage worked, Satan went to yellow elsewhere.
The priest remembered of some patient, of those whose recovery seemed almost a miracle.
One time came also a president of something, given back almost green by the devil in body. There to make back a normal hairpin he needed the brush of God in person, and after the massage you can note still here and there some stain of vomit.
The poor president had given the doctor of the church a precious goblet for hosts and wine, a lot of boxes of excellent Chianti from his hills.
The respectable patients did usually lavish donations, besides the nourishing fee for the applications against the devil.
A minister of another country went usually every summer in visit to our hero, after Venice, Rome, Florence, because he was feared to be infected by the devil in those so attractive places, and to discover it to the return in homeland.
He was convinced that the devil wandered by the side of the monuments, since hated God and the story and the work of the artists. Perhaps he was right.
Between the most curious persons the priest cured there was a special one, a Syrian that dealt in clothes for half Europe, rolling in money, that an ugly morning took the fever of the possessed.
He changed as chalk and cheese, began to curse against the world that before considered the paradise full of wealthy things.
He sneezed yellow dust, without having ever made use of tobacco.
He followed a course for manufacturing of fatal devices, having in his mind the senseless idea to climb to the top of the highest tower of the planet Earth to make it explode together with him.
In the few hours of clear headness left to him he was so lucky he met the exorcist from Arezzo, to invite him directly on the tower, with the vague intention to throw him down at the smallest hint of distraction.
The priest carried behind him the best ointments to make slide better his hands on the devil, plus some old tool of the remote past that could be useful in such circumstances.
When the challenge began it was established that the devil put a lot of indiscreet questions, question or thereabouts.
Massaging, the priest cheated it with a loquacity nothing bad, due to coffee, to smoke and to little hours of sleep. The devil was exhausted and liked better to leave the Syrian forever.
But before leaving the body of the dealer of clothes, turned round to his enemy maliciously, like only the devil knows. It was a species of odd tongue-twister whose the winner did not give any weight. It was a terrible mistake not to counter adequately those last words, since the wretch found them all on in the return to his church.
In the dream he understood that he had contract the curse.
He looked himself at to the mirror and already his skin began to change colour and consistency.
The creams did not serve, he could not let make it know neither the sexton nor the secretary. Noone should know.
In the next days he became allergic to the beauty, shifting violently laughs and youth, becoming the devil that treated in half-light his victims, without showing anymore his body, like a leprous.
Now yes, he looked like extraordinarily the monster of Florence.
The crazy fabulist
Introduction
Which is the family that does not brag to have an artist? Writers, musicians, painters are wherever like clovers. The unluckiest families have too many of them to maintain by sponging and brag themselves of great things, excessive works. But at all, at the table they are insatiable like they had a backwards hunger.
There are clothing, agency travels for which ask for money. One time they chose the best artists who were accommodated and maintained from the ones who could. Now they are a lot living at grandfathers’ and dads’ expense for the whole life, capable to set to zero the income of a middle class or rich in less than no time, to go then to beg some monthly little job.
Usually it is so, but not for the poor Aben Hamet, left without support after a terrible, long scarcity.
He lost house and work, sons and grandchildren. He had nothing but to redeem himself with the occupation of fabulist.
To think that he came down from a class more than adequate that owned the lands of the oil.
Never stock was more unfortunate than to pick an earthquake that blew up the installations, to take fire the subsoil, to drain with the wind of the desert all the remainder. The animals died, the oasis vanished, the mosques were reduced like and worst the fori imperiali of the ancient Rome.
Of the 15 wives noone was saved, shreds of dark clothes burnt, a little bones, although the big volume of fat almost equal for all.
He, who was so black, turned white in hair suddenly and took the ascetic appearance that is suited to a great writer and thinker, doing nothing else from the morning to the evening, eating little and drinking less, more and more inspired, detached from the cruel fate. You should be curious to know in which worked such a wonder. This is not the question, not even he knew it certainly, but he was convinced that those words are dictated by a friend spirit moved to pity of his destiny.
It was undoubtedly about a rare kind of stories, numbered like the Commandments, from one to hundred and so on, that quite soon got to their author a weird reputation.
Aben performed, and hidden hands spread in a more and more wide turn the artistic ideas of the wise man. In the small gems of wisdom that we will choose for you there is the mystery of the life of a man who instead dying together with his under the force of the natural cataclysm, succeeded to live and to make to talk about him so long the whole world.
Aben Hamet child
I address myself to you, child, to make you get up and grasp an arm. Begin to fire, hitting more in the center your target. I found a Tommy-gun, left there by some absent-minded soldier, in the last war that they made against us, because we stole women and drinks to a foreign country and enemy.
The voice of the prophet spoke directly to me child, above all in the warmest hours, when the oldest men died alone, abandoned to himself, under the 50 degrees in the shadow.
Water was for the rais and the 100 wives and concubines who washed themselves continuously, perfumed themselves in the western way.
Besides the voice of the prophet, I warned also a slight music in the right ear, after playing a little with the arm found and a shot left rebounded towards me from the belly of the elephant.
We were two very hard skins. Even those fixed notes like the song of the cicada, had been the preparation to perform the orders of my patron, already owner of the universe and of this world, not quite satisfied of state of things.
My parents sent me to amuse myself and to study to the west, worried of my physical and mental health, since I stayed for hours and hours as enraptured by my inner voices.
I did not know exactly who was this prophet, because he didn’t give himself a name, he was not the one adored from the remainder of the population, he had not that name.
Mine was without name and noone believed.
I was a lot gotten angry of that, I thought to remedy later on, making miracles, amazes, supernatural phenomena.
And when I came back to my country, after drinking forbidden drinks, listening to diabolical music, had girls of loose morals, I was ready to be a header, the leader of a slow people, who wanted only to cover their head when it was hot 50 degrees in the shadow.
The parrot
I elected as my big advisor an extraordinary parrot speakong 5 foreign languages and translated simultaneously. Said obscene words in the main western languages every time that news from those parts so hated arrived.
And like me, when came clear and strong the voice of my personal prophet, beat his head against the walls of the palace of gold and rubies.
Also the animal had not a name and many tried to poison it, because they thought he was my secret magic, but it was not so.
The prophet made the magic, since of night appeared more and more arms and war devices, an entire arsenal to give fire to the whole world.
It was enough that the parrot and me waited for in the shadow, and here the palace to overwhelm itself of every conceivable things, what my dreams of child had longed for when they believed me crazy.
My sweet big bird with its curved beak took to repeat the messages of the white voice, more and more pressing.
The muse, the sphinx explained me what I should become to have world, and I was sorry when to make me understand it used the poor bird advisor.
The mysterious hand of god did not poison it, but stuffed it from the beak. It blew up. Feathers, squirts of light green shit, color of the blood rather strange.
To illuminate me on my radiant future, of course.
The beard
Symbol of power and of kindliness became my beard, made grow to excess every month until the twenty-fifth one, then broken a little, just in order not to entangle myself at every side of the palace of gold and sapphires.
There were 15 concubines busy on the sacred beard in the sounding silence of the morning. What need we have of some music, when also the animals sing, complaining themselves strongly? We are not animals.
The odalisques smoothed my beard forwards and reverse, bound the end with belly strings very nice to show in public when I should bless the people.
More of many other profitable parts then, less noble, the beard took to be something of me than ruling me with iron hand.
When we stayed alone in front of the most opaque mirror of the palace of gold and amethysts, it began to choke me, giving the orders for the day.
“All the shaved ones, except the children under the three years, they come whipped on the public square, until some hair will rise.
“After the 18th year the length must not be inferior than 40 inches otherwise, indiscriminate blows.
“Must be created a special body of vigilance to fulfil in the best way such compassionate duty, and quickly!”
When the beard became too conceited, showing off itself proud in long and in width, I threatened to give it a little trim, but that began to wave for the laughs, aware that my power by now was ended in its volume greased and tedious.
The country became its kingdom. Wherever there were subjects followers of the sacred bindings of the long beard, who invoked the holy war against whoever had not lots of hairs.
In the darkness I seemed to see it detach itself from my face and take to dance satisfied in front of the window then to return, like if nothing happened, to my cheeks before I got up from my bed.
And when it was not anymore, I feared to touch myself, to look at me, because the devil surely was in my look, on my mouth, inside the ears whitish without hair. I felt to die, I was desperate.
My dear beard to protect carefully was sometimes sad, since feared that if I would fall in hostile hands, the first thing they would have done, was to cut it clean and to make lianas with it to amuse the monkeys of the pensile gardens.
Then I had to comfort it with rare essences of porcupine, until the melancholy did not leave the tangle.
The western men who had some coarse beard, ridiculous appendix of empty noddles, pierced, took to cut it for spite. Even the members of a wicked group of players with the beards almost prescribed, burnt them with the pipe in order not to resemble me.
What a stupid! And what a huge effort to extract me, with my powerful beard that takes vitality from nothing and from everything, from the increasing moon. Together, me and my beard undisturbed rise again continually.
The cubic and howling women
I had many wives and as many concubines who tried each other to comb my impressive beard without succeeding even to satisfy myself.
A lot of them were attractive, but in little time they became barrels of meat, cubes of gelatine, and hairier than me.
It’s just as well that they covered themselves entirely, so they did not trouble me, while I cultivated lonely pleases, leafing through the magazines of the devil, with all those females dressed almost of nothing.
To buy some possessed had become more difficult than kidnapping her. Every so often under the black garments, those thick veils that bound undone bodies, appeared a nose proboscidiform of elephant, thick and manly moustaches to doubt on the sex of belonging.
But they had been my women and the legitimate mothers of my sons and not, therefore I should take care of them, never running short of abounding food and some forbidden drink. So they eased themselves and did not kill each other furtively to have my absent-minded attention.
They consumed more than the army, more than the enormous eunuchs, more than my zoo of exotic animals, growing up wonderful obese sons. My favourite was named Blanca, weighed more than a ton, a kind of black whale, terrible, able to exterminate with a simple sneeze or crush 100 western females.
I married her as unquestioned heroin, after she tried a bizarre diet care to go to swim, sorry, to float in a sinful pool.
The first day of diet ended with an enormous stuffing, sprinkled by barrels of wines and liquor that I held for the great occasions.
At the dawn of the next day she found the not painless manner to eliminate a little superfluous meat. Instead putting on the moreover chaste swimsuit I gave her for the occasion, she stuffed herself of tnt and went to blow up in that damned pool.
So are my women, resolute, without fancy clothes.
She made a such massacre of western woman that became a lot popular and I felt myself fixed to marry her imposing remnants, today exhibited as panels in a room of the palace of gold and emeralds under the diction “great part of the contemporary art”.
Another heroin after Blanca took her place in my heart and in the one of my people.
She had no name, but churned out around twenty kids three, four for time, everybody like her.
Would I see someone like me, at least one of the twins, nothing.
She held them always close to herself like an enormous mother hen, but a day when she was away to go in solitude to our private mosque, those took the flight for the lost lands. The mother hen chirped a little, then went directly to take back again the offspring traitor, dragging with her soldiers armed to the teeth.
She exterminated her sons, found to buy cigarettes and music, giving them to me, attractive and decomposed.
What a woman! There is nothing to say, I am lucky.
The lineage
My succession was more than ensured, naturally.
I had written in my own handwriting the huge strip of sons, numbering them with care, so there could not be mistakes in case of death more or less accidental of the one or of the other.
I had also me my preferences, but I sacrificed them in name of a rigid system of selection that I go to describe, hoping you understand the importance to ensure an able heir, cunning, capable to shave whoever without replacing a hair of its.
I trained them all to a game, since the most tender age. I took them to our mosque during the daily rites, making them move the footwear of the believers so they couldn’t find them anymore. Who was able to deceive the believers more, won.
My strip of succession I compiled in this way and I regard myself satisfied.
The heir number one hide the shoes so well that still seek them in vain in very distant places, the clever! And he had chosen western shoes, double merit, double reason of esteem.
So those believers little orthodox had been punished of their vanity, remaining barefoot.
This heir was a mystery also for me, always so brilliant, dressed up, perfumed. His beard had the tastes of the sea of May, like he used products unknown to me.
The spy bike
Delma and Romeo were two old traditional bicycles, of those without special tricks to go swifter climbing or gaudy accessories that attract envy and thieves.
Delma was red and low, with the chain that beat the time at every start of pavement, and its Romeo was black faded, with its bell a little rusty and atonic.
Always parked at the station, close neighbours, in wait that between a train and another the respective owners returned. Always bound to the irons, they snickered at the sun and under the beating rain, every time that someone stole other bike or dismantled them to pieces to retail it the spares.
But Delma had a jealously guarded big secret, also from its Romeo. It was a spy-bike that patrolled every angle of the urban station at hunting not of thieves of wheels, but of those wretches that put bombs where arrived, because the human skull goes also on the untruths binaries and does not start again.
How was it able to free itself not even Romeo did understand. It suddenly took the flight without anyone realizing it, in the eternal hullabaloo of passengers, suitcases, trains, policemen, dogs, distributors, prostitutes, poodles, beggars.
The hours ran swift and it was already time to come back to its own place, held occupied by the faithful friend, as best it could, with triple turns of chain, an eastern patience.
Delma closed the turn of surveillance at nightfall and reopened it in the rush hours of the next day, very rewarded by its role of informer.
It told to Romeo things in the Turkish manner on the human doing gossip like a laundress. Only some year before was unimaginable that the world could become a powder-magazine ready to blow up with deafening roar at every latitude and longitude, in power of crazy furious roasted by the burning desert, like in the drawings of the favourite cartoon by Romeo, “The desert of the dead living”.
What could be ever able to do a rather old bike to avoid some ugly joke to the human race, instituted by itself?
Before they invented very attractive things to amuse themselves and to be well, but unfortunately they didn’t satisfy everybody. Among the ones who were not satisfied and liked better to die, giving the death simply to see the happy industriousness of the others, arose an unique race that considered itself superior. The beauty is that its heads had and enjoyed the best of what they wanted to eliminate, but they found more agreeable to kick the globe, to have the most disgusting power the human can conceive.
The heads sent to death poor devil to kill other poor devils, looked at their intestine, like sometimes do the bad children with the helpless animal.But the children change, when they begin to understand the pain, do not enjoy mentally of it.
A fresh morning of October, among the fog of smog that coiled the environs of the station, Delma had fierce thoughts, skirting one of the outside walls, and noted something of unusual. Two, three wretches, suitcases, hardly detained excitement, some stronger roar.
To whom could it remind? It was the desert around, too soon to awake, to watch few trains in arrival, others in departure.
The death was ready to collect a thin booty of waiting asleep, barkeepers, street-sweepers, students, whores. Perhaps would have waited for rush hours, the sly-boots!
Delma rang cautiously to a stray dog that sought to eat. They understood each others on the fly she and the wolf-cub without owner.
It hooked the group against the wall, making a noise that resounded inside the station, like it had a microphone and a powerful amplifier. They took them all, stuffed even in bottom.
The next day on the showcases of the daily stood out the photograph of the cub, awarded by gold medal for civil valor. Thwarted attack, the forces of police had a new very starving recruit.
And Delma felt like a true spy, gave itself airs, until it quarrelled with Romeo. They spent their day by themselves, until the return of their owners, deflating each other even the wheels.
To maintain long time the secret of the friend, Romeo learned to untie by itself to give a hand to the noble cause, but not having learned to bind itself quite well with the padlock, he was kidnapped and killed in spite of it bedraggled as it was, dismantled to pieces.
Delma cried for a week, growing rusty a little. Now it is courted by an enormous trekking bike, full of accessories, but it will be never like Romeo, not even deflating itself a little the wheels, or breaking itself some gear. Thinking that after so many months from the tragedy still Delma was not be able to go out in company of the muscular suitor.
Updated list of important men (and women)
Every period of the human civility has its eminent men, those who are the talk of the town, those whose photograph is at every side of district, to make the others open the mouth. Actually on the world stage there is a phantom sheik, nowhere to be found, dead or alive that is. A prophet, a philosopher who swings, pronouncing weird prayers for some unknown goddess, that escapes even to the zesty Tuscany curses. In those desecrates lands the name of the sheik is like the firm of a little refined sugar, economical, sold at the supermarket.
It is embarrassing to admit the continue of the limited strip, at least for how much it pertains my poor tormented country.
The sheik surpasses very much a rich football player, a meddler, a saltafossi, a Moroccan who defends the infibulation, a comic who makes laugh the chickens at the end of their life, a singing preacher, a very innocent mother murder, the president of all the usurers banks and thieves who resigns for the well of the homeland, after having served it eminently.
And then down, everyone to remake their faces and the bottom, to give parties to remove together fat, wrinkles, white hair, smelling weird powders.
It is continuously a party, to have public relations, because is not important what one knows to do, but who meets around. So noone is able to do anything, but speaking hail and stripping themselves, since to treat the public relations costs every precious hour of the one’ disconcerting actual existence.
The list stays open to an army of men that make jobs not properly adapt to their obvious or hidden capacity. Men very, very eminent, women very, very famous.
It is astonishing this period, so cheerful and criminal, such crazy to seem more than normal. A bundle of chrysanthemums painted by a poor person sick of Alzheimer, set to music by a person that ate too much pork, recounted by a honest tax-collector, ended in the Arabic prisons.
Catherine wheel
Small alarms. Place, the town, a nature canceled. Time, at school, at Commune, at the free radio.
The afternoon, the evening, the night. There is a precise and dragging fact? What a boredom all this fog and this fake, hypocritical quietness, this still obtusity. Which is the difference between the death and here? That the first one is natural.
When became the girlfriend of a boy compelled to close his shop under the blackmail of banks, usurers, also to her came up the civil death in her fine country all sun, love, pain.
When then her father died, the numerous relatives declared her dead and buried her in too young age in the fine country all heart, mommy, family.
And she left. The journey became her favourite way of life. She did not know other that were so amusing. Foreigner, above all her own country moreover marvellous to visit. Tourist, vacationer, in every square, in every road. Scribbler the Catherine-wheel.
How many houses dismantle and reassembled, how many hotels inhabited? The fugitive.
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