Chapter 4
«My name is Patrick Winningoes
Parnell and I was born at Wadebridge, in Cornwall, in the south-west of
England, to a Catholic Irishwoman and a Protestant Englishman. My father, Lord
Isaac Winningoes, whose family was among the noblest and most ancient for
English lineage, at that time, was a very close adviser of the British
government. My mother was named Mary Josephine Parnell.
In those times Great Britain
was still a vast empire and Ireland, born earth of my mother, made integrally
part of it.
After a happy infancy, I was
enrolled at a classical studies school, but when I was sixteen something
happened to me so seriously to change radically the course of my life.
Without any apparent reason my
father took me away from the College and the same day of such a sudden
resolution, in a night of storm, I was embarked on a ship, “The Ulysses”, that
anchored at Land's End, attended my arrival to set sail.
My father didn't want to give
me any explanation and, despite I implored him crying, that I didn't want to
depart without greeting my mother, he was inflexible. He delivered two letters
to me: one for the reverend Jacob Sevear, who would have become my despotic
guardian; the other for me, and I read it in tears, when my beloved coasts were
already distant from sight.
The letter contained, a few
recommendations on the principles that a good child has to observe, together
with the information that my destination would have been Boston, in the U.S.A.,
and that I had to be in charge to reverend Sevear's.
The life that attended me
beyond the ocean was, my friends, a hard life indeed to be sustained.
Certainly, I had all the comforts of life, but I lived in a gilded isolation,
without almost any contact with the outside world. My guardian was inflexible
on applying those rules that, as he underlined, had been ordered to him by my
father: I could not go out, if not in his company; I didn't have to possess any
sum of money, providing himself to satisfy any my desire; even the newspapers
and the magazines passed for his careful censorship, before I could read them.
After some time, my captivity
slightly decreased, but I still felt as a prisoner and for my mind, offended
and violated, to find a free play in the studies, in which my guardian worked
out to be a wise and able preceptor, was a matter of surviving.
How many nights I dreamed to
fly, like Icarus, over the Atlantic or to sail, as Ulysses, searching for new,
craving lands! How many nights I cried, thinking of my mother and my distant
born beaches! How I felt heavy, then, my father's hand on my head and that of
my sad destiny! For how much I tried on it, however, I didn't succeed in
breaking those chains that tormented me. From time to time I contrived a plan
to run away, but I always postponed it, hoping that the day after a letter from
England would come, to bring me the freedom, the end of my nightmare and its
mysteries.
After years of that life of
segregation, finally came the very expected day: On my twenty-first birthday
the reverend Sevear handed me over a letter from my father on which he
accounted the circumstances that were the origin of all my sufferings and that
so much had to influence my life in the future. But the joy for the long,
desired truth, was darkened by the sad news, in the same letter contained, that
my mother, my beloved mother, had died, two years before, in the prison of
Primestone.
I was informed through that
letter that my mother, just a little before my departure for Boston, had been
halted with the accusation of plotting to overturn the institutions and the
Crown, an accusation much more serious, being my father a man in the service of
the State. She was found guilty, and only the interest that some friends of my
father showed towards, saved her from the inglorious end that struck all the
other heads of the revolt: the hanging in public square.
But she could not stand up
with the imprisonment as she wrote herself in one of the few letters that she
was allowed to write to me, and which the reverend Sevear had been ordered not
to deliver to me before my twenty-first birthday:
The scandal that followed the
discovery of the plot to free Ireland from the oppressive English yoke, had
also overwhelmed my father, who was forced by his political enemies to resign.
The aspect of the whole circumstance for me more spine-chilling was constituted
by the fact that my father himself had discovered and denounced the secret
activity of my mother, for whose he asked me to be forgiven and hoped that I
would understand the involved, ethics implications.
How I hated him henceforth! I
cursed him, one hundred, thousand times, from that day and for the days to
come! How could he have chosen his stupid state’s reason against the love of a
fragile and sweet creature as my mother? Why did he not embark her with me to
subtract her to the jailers? His king, then, was more worthy than his woman in
his heart?
He recommended himself to my
comprehension, since he did act for my own goodness, leaving me out,
considering also my youth, from the clamors and from the shame of the scandal
that had overwhelmed our honorable name, and he finally remembered to me, that
only God can judge man’s operations. That atrocious contradiction induced me to
also hate “his” God. If only Him could judge men’s behaviors, why did he accuse
my mother to a Court of men?!? - “
That regrettable question
concluded the monologue of our guest, to which we had assisted in a religious
silence but with long live share.
While evoking his memoirs,
that I imagined a remote for forgetful time in his mind; above all speaking of
his mother, in his voice a veiled tone of emotion had appeared.
And I don't know if I really
perceived a mist in his eyes, ‘cause it lasted only for a bit: after pouring a
glass of water and drinking it with avarice, he fleetingly passed a candid
napkin on his face, with which he suddenly cancelled any trace of it. Then he
stayed immovably, absorbed in his sad memoirs, or perhaps picking up ideas to
continue his story. George had followed him for the whole time with the chin
supported by the closed fists on the edge of the table. Without proffering a
word he lit a cigarette and soon after pushed the packet to me. With a peaceful
and indifferent tone, Mr Winningoes took back on his speech.
The same day I learned from my
teacher that I was the only heir of my mother’s estates, and that since the day
of her death, he had been its honest and prudent administrator, as he was ready
to detail me on his account.
That man, I had so much hated
and blamed, now that his ungrateful charge had come to end, seemed to me good
and comprehensive, and his words calmed my incurable pain. Nevertheless, I
needed to think about my life, and in those places I would never succeed in
shaking off my sad past. I begged the reverend to continue to administer my
goods and I departed, to discover the world.
I travelled at first through
the United States and Canada, then I went to Australia and New Zealand. After I
visited Europe, I never found the courage to return to my country. Tired of the
European Countries, among which I mostly liked Italy, I departed to India and
finally, always curious about new lands, I went to Africa.
Neither women, nor
alcohol, nor drugs, not even the vices which I was devoted to in
those years succeeded in cancelling my bitter memoirs, until one day, while I
was sojourning in Kenya, I fell ill, prey of strong fevers. Not a lot, then I
gave, to live or die, but Fate had evidently prepared that I survived, so that
the programs could be realized, whose I will have the honor and the pleasure to
communicate to you. Revealed therefore from the illness, I returned to America
aiming however to the south, that I had not visited yet.
Once I had satisfied my
world's curiosity, I took over again my studies, more strongly and surely than
before. I was akin of all: medicine, biology, physics, mathematics, chemistry,
hidden sciences, illusionism, magic arts, engineering, electronics, astrology,
philosophy, astronomy, sociology, anthropology, theology, ethnology, history,
juridical, economic and political sciences and every other thing attracted my
mind curious of reaching new knowledge.
During the numerous years of
my following study, it happened to me a gradual mutation that flowed, between a
short lapse of time, in a great, bright revelation. I had realized, deepening
on studies, that any single subject lost, little by little, until vanish, its
own contours and that all acquired information met in a bubbly melting pot, to
form just one, immense nucleus of knowledge.
Yes, dear friends: our
knowledge is an original, total unity. The single disciplines of human
knowledge are but the infinitesimally small fragments that mankind looks
hopelessly for recomposing into the aboriginal unity.
Two were the necessary
consequent corollaries to this thrilling discovery. The first one is that the
brain of both animal and human beings constitutes, though at a different
evolutionary stage, a microscopic part of the primordial totality. The second
is that human thought search, yet in a blind and messy manner, to recompose, at
a mental level, the great, primitive explosion, the Big-Bang, through a long
and fatiguing marching back, up to the innumerable light years that separate
it, from an equal, yet opposite, roaring and powerful implosion. And if you
consider that our mind speculates in space-time as fast as speed-light, this
kind of final Big-Imbang will appear less far than any hasty forecast.
The burst of the second world
war caught me surprised on this walk of studies and searches.
Bitterly I was forced to
consider that human beings pursued their premature end, rather than search for
the truth. But at that time I hadn't understand yet that every human
action, even the most iniquitous and bestial, has however its own reason to be
done and for me, that war, would have been another fundamental step on the way
of comprehension.
During the war I had the
opportunity to deeply analyze the causes of those disastrous events. I had
been, it is true, in the years immediately preceding the war completely devoted
to my studies, in a way that I could call purely scientific of the phenomena
which stand at the base of the human life, but it was not certainly in the
forthcoming years of war that we had to seek its reasons and inmost causes. The
roots of hate and evil sank their extreme appendixes in the most tangled and
lavish meanders of the human mind. These deleterious feelings, so inherent to
the human mind, were to be conceived like the principal causes of that huge
bath of blood.
From this premise I puzzled
out that the basic beliefs of the national socialist philosophy were correct:
humanity, in order to be saved, needed a superior race to be raised over the
others for leading them to salvation. But the German race could not certainly
be the chosen one. Not even any other among the existing races could be that,
because it had to be a race who didn't know, in their hearts but goodness and
love.
With a greater fury than
before, I addressed all my energies against the hateful enemy: I challenged
death ten, hundred, thousands of times, always defeating the adversary.
Little by little, I started
perceiving what role it was reserved to me in the history of the world and the
contours of my destiny assumed more and more its clean and precise outline».
While pronouncing his last
words Mr Winningoes, who had gradually been increasing his excitement during
the narration, lifted up the right hand, tensing his forefinger as an accuser,
and his eyes rotated a couple of times halting eventually in an insane
expression of craziness depicted on his face. He remained for indefinite time
with the lift forefinger, staring into space, with his muscles tended as if
they had wanted to get out of standing. He seemed like a statue of marble,
immortalized in a grotesque pose. This sudden explosion of apparent madness
came unexpectedly. Before we had the time to interact, however, the man seemed
to recover himself. He looked around, lost and embarrassed and, grabbed a glass
of water, voided all of it in a hit. The water seemed to calm the man. His eyes
showed a serene light and he looked like being almost absent, lost in his
thoughts or perhaps looking to recompose the interrupted line of his story. He
pulled the refreshments trolley and picked up a carafe filled with a golden
colored liquid.
«Have a drink, please. It is
cognac from Charente, one of the few things that I appreciate about French
people».
This way of saying he poured
some of that liquid in a short, carved wine glass, explaining to us that a
cognac, to be really good, has to leave, if slightly rotated, a thin layer of
color inside the glass.
As soon as I had drunk, I
immediately felt a comforting warmth. On the warm’s alcohol wave I thought that
that man surely knew so much indeed about life. His theories, nevertheless, yet
quite abstruse to me, showed a sort of suggestive charm.
I imagined my brain imploding
together with George’s, melting with it and flying, as a winged rocket, in the
endless universe.
