Brief Lives of Idiots by Ermanno Cavazzoni

 



 

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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