My mother, may God rest her soul, was the only one in the family who had learned to drive. She once got a flat on the Major Deegan Expressway and recounted that motorists would whizz by the lady in evident distress without so much as a sidelong glance. The only ones who turned to look, she said, were black, and eventually one of them stopped to help her change the tire.
Last week I mentioned in passing the end-of-an-era arrest of Messina Denaro, the last of the great mafia latitanti who evaded capture for decades. Palermo is all abuzz like a disturbed vespiary, and even the usual morning fireworks – a perennial mystery to the visitor – have gone quiet on the news. Absurdly or not, the boom and crackle of the invisible pyrotechny marks the release of somebody of consequence from prison.
“How safe do people feel to walk alone on the streets at night?” Last week an acquaintance of ours, the irrepressible Olga Romanova, a recent exile from Russia, published a map thus headed in her Telegram blog.
I can’t find the film I once saw – I think it was with David Niven, playing lawn tennis and a jovial conman – but I remember that it reminded me of a similar scene in Thomas Mann’s last novel, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man.
I hasten to advise the gentle reader that any association with Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play of the same name as this post would be almost entirely spurious, except that the visitor due in Palermo tomorrow is as intelligent a lady as Frau Claire, the Swiss playwright’s heroine.
I’ve been reading about Charles Ponzi. What a man. In some vague way his story continues the argument of last week’s post about Donald Trump, but in this instance there’s no need to dot the i’s. This time round I invite the gentle reader to come up with his own farfetched interpretations and fanciful allusions.
A reader’s comment on last week’s post triggered an inchoate thought, and in its wake a lucid recollection. I remembered my erstwhile and now late father-in-law who, among his other dubious accomplishments, was a friend of Donald Trump, most closely so in the latter’s Ivana phase.
I return to last week’s night at the theater of the absurd as news comes that the royal couple, the Duke and the Dauphin – all right, Dauphine – of our times, have demanded that Buckingham Palace apologize to them for Lady Hussey’s impertinence. The impertinence, as the gentle reader may recall, lay in asking a woman in outlandish garb where she came from.
Certainly the gentle reader is by now quite tired of the marionettes in the theater of the absurd to which our editor recently alluded in his post “America – the Picture Show.” So am I, of course. To debate with a puppet, to point out the strings that hold it aloft, to rage at the big lie at the heart of the spectacle – all this was already tedious enough twenty or thirty years ago, when the show first opened, but today it’s just a waste of breath.
As the gentle reader seems to have appreciated the trope of Sunday night in Modena as an abandoned mining town in a spaghetti western, I keep pushing it. But first, a scene from Palermo.
