JК
The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana :: Эко Умберто
Страница: 186 из 286A globe rolls up to me with a huge eagle atop it, and after the bird comes the ashen face of the Presbitero pencil man, with a hundred pencils bristling from his head like hair standing on end from fear… I know them, they were my companions when as a child I lay in bed with fever, feeling immersed in royal soup, in a purulence of yellow well-springs that boiled around me as I cooked in their broth. Now, as in those nights, I am lying in the darkness of my room when suddenly the doors of the dark old wardrobe open and out comes a crowd of Uncle Gaetanos. Uncle Gaetano had a triangular head, with a sharp chin and curly hair that formed two excrescences at his temples, a consumptive face, gloomy eyes, and one gold tooth at the center of
a rotten set. Like the pencil man. The Uncle Gaetanos came forth at first in pairs, then multiplied, dancing around my room with marionette-like motions, bending their arms geometrically, sometimes wielding a two-meter ruler like a cane. They would return with every seasonal flu, every measles or scarlet fever, to plague those late afternoons when my temperature would rise, and I feared them. Then they would go away as quickly as they had come-perhaps they went back into the wardrobe, and later, as I convalesced, I would open it fearfully and examine the interior inch by inch, but I never found the hidden passage from which they had emerged.
When I was well, I would, on occasion, meet Uncle Gaetano along the avenue on Sunday at noon, and he would smile at me with his gold tooth, caress my cheek, say "Good lad," and move on. He was a nice old guy, and I never understood why he came to haunt me when I was sick, nor did I dare ask my parents what was so ambiguous, so oily, so subtly threatening about Uncle Gaetano’s life, his very being.
What was it I had said to Paola when she held me back from being run over by a car? That I knew that cars run over chickens, that the driver hits the brakes to avoid them and black smoke comes out and then two men in dustcoats with big black goggles have to start it again with a crank. At the time I did not know, now I do, that these men appeared after Uncle Gaetano during my bouts of delirium.
Those men are here, I meet them suddenly in the mist.
I barely dodge them, their car is anthropomorphically hideous, and out they jump, wearing masks and trying to grab me by my ears. My ears are now extremely long, astronomically asinine, flaccid and hairy, they could stretch to the moon. Watch out, because if you’re a bad boy, never mind Pinocchio’s nose, you’ll get Meo’s ears! Why was that book not in Solara? I was living inside Meo’s Ears.
I have regained my memory. Except that now-when it rains it pours-my memories are wheeling around me like bats.
The fever has been going down since the last quinine pill: my father is sitting by my little bed reading me a chapter of The Four Musketeers. Not the three, the four.
a rotten set. Like the pencil man. The Uncle Gaetanos came forth at first in pairs, then multiplied, dancing around my room with marionette-like motions, bending their arms geometrically, sometimes wielding a two-meter ruler like a cane. They would return with every seasonal flu, every measles or scarlet fever, to plague those late afternoons when my temperature would rise, and I feared them. Then they would go away as quickly as they had come-perhaps they went back into the wardrobe, and later, as I convalesced, I would open it fearfully and examine the interior inch by inch, but I never found the hidden passage from which they had emerged.
When I was well, I would, on occasion, meet Uncle Gaetano along the avenue on Sunday at noon, and he would smile at me with his gold tooth, caress my cheek, say "Good lad," and move on. He was a nice old guy, and I never understood why he came to haunt me when I was sick, nor did I dare ask my parents what was so ambiguous, so oily, so subtly threatening about Uncle Gaetano’s life, his very being.
What was it I had said to Paola when she held me back from being run over by a car? That I knew that cars run over chickens, that the driver hits the brakes to avoid them and black smoke comes out and then two men in dustcoats with big black goggles have to start it again with a crank. At the time I did not know, now I do, that these men appeared after Uncle Gaetano during my bouts of delirium.
Those men are here, I meet them suddenly in the mist.
I barely dodge them, their car is anthropomorphically hideous, and out they jump, wearing masks and trying to grab me by my ears. My ears are now extremely long, astronomically asinine, flaccid and hairy, they could stretch to the moon. Watch out, because if you’re a bad boy, never mind Pinocchio’s nose, you’ll get Meo’s ears! Why was that book not in Solara? I was living inside Meo’s Ears.
I have regained my memory. Except that now-when it rains it pours-my memories are wheeling around me like bats.
The fever has been going down since the last quinine pill: my father is sitting by my little bed reading me a chapter of The Four Musketeers. Not the three, the four.