All Men Are Liars Read Online Free Page B

priest’s words. His response to that power was to take out a few coins from his pocket and place them in the shriveled hand. The old man looked at the coins, looked at his benefactor, and burst out laughing. Bevilacqua mumbled an explanation. Still laughing, the old man apologized, thanked him for the gesture, and returned the coins.
    For a few days afterward, Bevilacqua looked for the old man he had seen on the corner of the street. Then, one afternoon, returning from school, he saw him standing, as before, beneath the same tree. The old man motioned for him to come forward. Bevilacqua obeyed, feeling a little nervous. Now that he saw him again, he was not too sure what to say. It was the old man who spoke first.
    â€œYou’re wondering what I’m doing standing here on my own, looking like this, if I’m not a beggar, aren’t you? You imagine that beggars look like this. You see me and say to yourself, ‘That’s a beggar
.
’ But you shouldn’t trust appearances, boy. Do you like puppets?”
    Bevilacqua had seen a puppet show only once in his life, at a boring birthday party. Curiosity and surprise prompted him to say that he did.
    â€œFollow me,” said the apocryphal beggar, and taking the boy by his arm, he led him toward the Barrancas district. They stopped in front of a decrepit-looking house with large, low windows.
    I’ll paint the scene for you.
    Bevilacqua had recently entered adolescence. Far from mistrusting the human libido, the interest which he was capable of provoking in adults intrigued him. That second glance in the bus; that silent sizing up, seeking signs of mutual interest in the street; that knee moving closer in the dark-ness of a cinema—Bevilacqua took them as a compliment, as welcoming gestures on the threshold of adulthood. I’m not saying that the old man was a pervert, nor that Bevilacqua had a taste for those pleasures so well described in Greek literature. But something that he had not noticed before now removed his fear, prompting him to carry on, to go with the old man and slip into the rooms of an unknown house.
    Slip
is perhaps not the right word, since it suggests a progress which meets no resistance. The rooms of this house were obstacles in themselves, each one stuffed with all kinds of objects: wardrobes, shelves crammed with books, armchairs, desks and bedside tables, statues that looked as though they were made of stone and turned out to be papier-mâché, piles of newspapers tied together with twine, laundry baskets, unidentifiable packages—and on top of every object, protruding from every conceivable gap, there were puppets of every style and size. Arms, legs, daubed faces with glass eyes and colorful wigs peeped coyly out from behind the furniture or sprawled obscenely on the boxes, collectively evoking an orgy or a battlefield. For a few seconds, Bevilacqua had the impression of having entered an ogre’s cave, filled with the corpses of dwarves.
    The old man picked up a Roman soldier from a threadbare chair and offered the seat to Bevilacqua, then sat down opposite him, on a large painted chest. Apparently the old man (whose name, by the way, was Spengler) then launched into a long and seductive paean to the art of puppetry, in which creatures made of wood and felt enacted before an audience a more solid reality than that of our own illusory world. Spengler said that he took his theater to schools and parks, factories and prisons, with the aim of telling what he called “truthful lies.” “I am a missionary from the world of storytelling,” he told Bevilacqua. And giving the boy a little slap on the thigh (Bevilacqua would have judged it innocent, but I’m not so sure), he began pulling on different strings, leaping over the furniture, and making mysterious noises.
    As you can imagine, Bevilacqua was fascinated by all those tiny arms and bodies, noses and eyes. At twelve or thirteen, we do not