A fox in the desert E-Book

Luigi Savagnone

• Herausgeber: Luigi Savagnone
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Normally, a 25-year-old man has some prospects for the future. The protagonist of this story do not. He is brutalized by the life he leads and everything seems futile, unnecessary and unhealthy. He received an unexpected communication recruitment in the bank; reluctant, knowing his character, starts to work, because knows that a job in the bank is coveted by many of his peers. He can withstand only a few days; gets sick and he takes a vacation in the near Sahara desert. There, a series of tragicomic adventures reduce him dying. He returned to work battered, and resists this time, only one day ...

Leseprobe

© 2014  A fox in the desert

Luigi Savagnone

I apologize first of all, if my novel can be misinterpreted by someone. I wrote it with love and passion, and with the sole purpose of being able to help the readers to think positively when facing certain situations.

The definitions of the glossary are taken from Wikipedia.

Chapter 1

Prologue

     When I was little, old people of my country me constantly told that everyone, sooner or later, reach their ideal status and are able to live happy, or at least with equanimity, the rest of life before death will overtake. It is with this knowledge and certainty, for the fact that I have always considered wise and infallible, the older me have educated that I have lived my youth, but ... up to now, as I, for my part, I could not to accomplish and achieve anything ....... !!

     I'm twenty-five years, so mid-twenties, and I think that more than a quarter of a century I have lived. The whole world around me I got bored. It seems almost a giant leech sucking every day all that is good in me: my youth, my thoughtlessness, my love. I see it all gray and dreary, entirely mechanical. Each step in the road seems like a rite, a rite usual too. Where did, I think, that inspiration that makes us unlike the beasts: where's the taste of knowledge that has elevated the status of barbarians in which our ancestors lived in caves. Everything seems static, automatic, remote controlled. Where is the friendship that has allowed us to come together in the city? Where is the love, so sacred two thousand years ago, and now so profane, that gave us an interest in survival? The big factories on the horizon, and blacks chimneys spewing poisons into the atmosphere. That made us the nature to repay with such money? The coasts are now polluted by harmful debris smelly that we produce. That made us, that sea so benign, that cleanses us from our fetid sweat every summer, to be repaid in this way? Often I get close to people to listen to their speeches: all logical and seemingly ideal, but looking up and crossing it with them, I realize the treachery that release those eyes. Then I look at myself and think. Why this stupid meat needs of food and liquids if he expels them all! So it is unnecessary to give it if he does not bear good fruit! But the survival instinct overrides any logic. We all seem as automata, animals lacking any imagination and intelligence! And the women then, to me alone and abandoned, like I am, they seem to me UFO ... so much I am unable for seek one girl! And, as a consequence of my state of mind, every time a girl smiles at me with kindness, I am convinced that in reality hides a monster ready to devour me! I need sex, sex without limits! But then I do not want to get trapped! I know that in Haiti invoke Erzulia, the ancient Egyptians and then the Romans also invoked Isis, the goddess of sex!

     I went very often to prostitutes, available only women to want to make love with me, and I was humiliated, hoping in bottom of my heart, that they were hiding a goddess, who finally grant me her graces, though, for a fee, and I did not dare ask them anything else, that the permission to lick their feet. 

      For these and other reasons that I am not here to enumerate, I have depleted all my hard-earned cash and I bought an old fishing shack located on a small pier near my house. I bought it for two hundred thousand lire, and I must say that I'm quite happy that I did this thing. To tell the truth, I only paid a little 'peace of mind, because the building is not worth even a quarter of that money: it is rectangular, six meters by two, all wood, rotten because corroded by salt, soiled by mold, because abandoned to itself for some time. I have not touched or clean anything, I like the smell of ancient! I only brought a small table, a gas lamp, a small stove and a sofa for my meditations. 

     There, then, I spent most of my time studying a book that has given me a fisherman. I wanted to learn how to build a boat, a small rowing boat to leave the shore and watch from a place living, the dead city. And while I studied as wrap the timber, the hours passed in absolute tranquility, broken only by the sound of waves crashing on small pier, and the subtle hiss of gas that kept alive the flame of the lamp. I was thinking of Hemingway and his 'The Old Man and the Sea' and I imagined myself to be that fantastic character, I imagined myself old man with a beard abundant and unkempt, but with the mind quiet while I savored the sweet taste of tobacco by sucking my briar pipe. Ah! As would have been important to me that little boat! What is accumulate treasure on earth when one is always agitated. What is to have a family, then when children are the same, the blood of your blood, the first to trample you. I purposely chose to study the book of boats in that place uncomfortable and humid, rather than comfortably in my home for a very simple reason: when I am in the city, the disgust that fills me, even just listening to the sound of it, I prevents any form of poetry, any goodness, any peace of mind, making me neurotic and unable to assimilate these teachings yet so simple. There, however, in that shack so close geographically, but so far ideally, I am transformed, reborn! That fisherman who had lent me the book was ready, behind lavish hand of course, to make the boat I wanted for me. I refused! The boat is sacred for me, is the carrier that allows me to live in the true sense of the word, is the way to be accepted among the charitable arms of the sea. And so it was that one day, a cold day in November, I decided to put into practice those teachings that the book had given me. I bought the wood, nails, a hammer, a chisel, a saw and a planer. I began to cut the hull and the keel so that they were free of sharp edges and well polished. At the end they are the foundation on which rests the entire building, which is why I put fifteen days to finish it. Then I stared at the wheel of the bow, which is the point of union of the two sets of harnesses. 

     While doing that work, I remembered reading that the Vikings considered that axis of wood as an essential part of their boats, even from the point of view of aesthetics and adorned with decorations and sculptures. I have always admired the Vikings: a people hard and rough, but fair. Great conquerors, but above all great explorers, having been now proven that they discovered America long before Columbus. My hands worked almost automatically, while my imagination wandered without limits of time or space. After the wheel bow was once the most delicate and difficult operation: the assembly of the plating. Each strip of wood needed of ten days to cut, plane it, soften it so that it could be fixed. It took me about four months to complete this operation, but already most of the work was done, I had in fact built both the inner and outer shell, and I also fixed the frames, which are the real backbone of the boat. I worked with passion, and I saw again myself as a child, when I was playing with kits that gave me my mother. As time has passed, how many hopes have vanished, many flaws and quirks are gone! Now I'm a man, and too old for the age I am! After the plating, I remained only the fixing of the transom, which is the part of the boat on which rests the rudder and the rudder itself, the plank, which is a wooden pole that surrounds the whole boat, which is secured within it perpendicularly to the frames; then the benches, the rowlocks, which serve to turn the oars, the oars themselves and finally the brackets to keep fixed the benches. A beautiful painted was the final touch and then my boat was ready. 

     I was frantic, I could not wait to take to the sea and that's why working with a great mood, taking care to details and doing coincide perfectly the different parts that had to be fixed close to each other to avoid even the smaller gap, which could then give me trouble. It took me another month to complete the construction. I painted all in azure and I was proud of myself! 

     That launch, it seemed like a historic moment in my life, was that moment when I could separate myself from that sad and dismal social life.

Chapter 2

A fox in the desert

     It is now May 15 and now I am ready: the waves are inviting and it seems to me whisper, "Come, make haste, great things await you." I'm excited, I must admit. However, reflecting perhaps with a little 'of masochism, I think maybe it is better to spend another little' time in the city away from my shack and my boat.. I'm sure after a few days in that chaos, I will be so disgusted that the time of the launch will seem even more beautiful! Returning then home to resume my life between study and solitary walks, I open the mailbox and I find therein an envelope. I look at the stamp, for see if a foreign friend that I had known long ago he wrote to me. No, the stamp is Italian Postal Service; intrigued I open the envelope and I find there a typescript bearing the initials on the title National Bank of Labor. Somewhat surprised, I keep reading, and eyes widening with astonishment, I read that I was hired at the bank. Crazy things! How is it possible, I think, that my distant uncle has managed to do this to me 'nice gift!' All right, work completely contrary to my needs and expectations, but it costs nothing to try. It may well be that I will become a middle-class m [...]