Eccentric,
comic, experimental - a trio of qualities attributed to Italian author
Ermanno Cavazzoni. His writing certainly worked for me. I had an
absolute blast reading his Brief Lives of Idiots, all thirty-one
short chapters, one per idiot (actually, several chapters feature a batch of idiots sharing something in common).
One distinct
characteristic of the idiots in Ermanno Cavazzoni's book: they have a
particular behavior or take a specific action that's outside of
convention and what passes for acceptable and normal. Take for example a
Mr. Vacondio, husband and father, who was an enemy of speed, a man
preoccupied with things like the incredible speed of the earth rotating
around the sun. During the day at home or in his office, “he always kept
his eyes half-shut and head down, like someone riding a motorcycle with
the wind in his face. He even sat in his office chair like a biker, and
always wore a neck scarf in summer and winter, tied very tightly so as
not to catch a draft.” In Mr. Vacondio's mind, completely appropriate,
since, after all, we're all going so fast and it is sound wisdom to
acknowledge the truth.
Then there's a Mr. Pigozzi who lived in
East Germany and didn't get along with his wife or his daughter. He read
in the newspaper about a mechanical engineer who built a small airplane
and fled to West Germany. Why not do the same? So Mr. Pigozzi set out
to rig his Fiat 850, after sufficient modification, with wings so he
could likewise fly over the border. Any bets on Mr. Pigozzi making it?
And
there's Sauro Gallinari, a tenant farmer who lived with his mother
along a country road. Gallinari kept a blood pressure gauge beside him
in the field. He fancied himself a doctor, wore a white smock, and would
rap the cuff around anybody willing to have him take their blood
pressure. Sometimes he wrapped the cuff around the victim's arm,
sometimes their leg, and began pumping up the cuff. He frequently did
this on his mother but one day Gallinari got carried away and rapped the
cuff around his mother's neck. He pumped it up. His mother tried to
speak but she could only gag. Ah, Gallinari reasoned, problems with her
blood pressure! So he pumped some more. The consequence? In the author's
words, “It was deemed an erroneous application of first aid, for which
he was acquitted of the charge of premeditated voluntary manslaughter;
yet he was barred from the practice of medicine and all related
activities, as he had no degree and wasn't licensed by the medical
board.”
Among my favorite selections, there are short snips on suicides. Here's one example from each chapter:
WORKING
SUICIDES - "A saleswoman at a fur shop locked herself in a closet full
of mothballs one Saturday night. Since the shop was closed through
Monday, she died from inhaling the fumes. A note cursing the shop owner
was found beside her."
COLLATERAL SUICIDES: "On 10 September, an
alcoholic lawyer who'd lost everything jumped off a bridge. But along
with him fell a pensioner who had tried to hold him back. The pensioner
drowned, whereas the lawyer was taken to shore still drunk and
unconscious."
NEAR SUICIDES: "After a series of vocal cracks in
March of 1982, a tenor locked himself in his dressing room and shot
himself with a revolver. When they broke down the door he was alive
because the gun was a prop gun. The tenor stated he hadn't known."
As translator Jamie Richards states in her introduction entitled LONG LIVE THE IDIOTS
where she relates Cavazzoni's thinking on the subject, "The persistence
of the idiot disavows the dream of progress, and modernity in all its
mythic grandeur is revealed to be a chimera." She goes on to quote the
author, "I see idiots as only more evident examples of the universal
behavior of all people."
I'm confident you can come up a string
of idiotic behavior you've heard about or witnessed firsthand. I vividly
recall several idiots from my boyhood growing up at the New Jersey
shore -
Freddie “Nitwit” Nickens would wait until a car came
close then run across the highway, forcing the driver to slam on the breaks so as not to hit him.
When in fifth grade, Alan Smith read
on his report card that he was being held back next year, he tore the
report card into small pieces right there in class in front of his
teacher and classmates.
Ben “The Moose” Thomas dove off the back
of a 20' high dive at the local beach into water 3' deep. Fortunately,
he didn't become a paraplegic.
Before the big high school football game with the Central Regional Eagles, as a way to pump up the team to Kill the Eagles,
an assistant coach brought a live chicken into the locker room and cut
off its head in front of the players. The players were made sick and the
assistant coach had to write a letter of apology to the parents.
One
hotheaded high school football coach punched a player from the other
team in the face after the game. When the police came to the locker room
to arrest him, he had his players hide him under a stack of football
jerseys. Afterward, in court, the lawyer for the injured player said
they would drop charges if he agreed never to coach football again. He
agreed (thank goodness!).
I encourage everyone to give Ermanno Cavazzoni's book a read. Surely you'll have as much of a blast as I had.
Italian author Ermanno Cavazzoni, born 1945
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