According to an unreliable source
A letter from Uncle Albert arrived in this morning’s mail. The reader may recall that while he
writes emails to everyone else, his cretin congressman, his stabenovic senior senator,
the whiners at CNN, and the blowhards at Fox (his terms), he writes only
letters to me.
This begins as usual, “Ah, my
favorite nephew!” then launches directly into the matter at hand.
I
was thinking last night when I went to bed about my old friend and mentor,
Giancarlo Fellini, no relation to the filmmaker but a childhood friend of Eugenio
Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII. Or so he claimed, because my Fellini could hardly have been old enough. He certainly wasn’t in his eighties when I
studied with him in Paris during my sabbatical in the fall of 1958 – when the
pope died.
 |
| Pius XII by m ball |
The
result was that the pope didn’t die of the clap – at least not clap that he
picked up in Polynesia; rather he did die “in a huge
stink and bother” and only “after years of stink and bother already," or so Fellini.
“He got sicker and sicker under the care
of that minuscule quack Galazzi-Lisi and the other one, the German, whose ‘rejuvenation
treatment’ only revived Genio’s childhood nightmares, full of demons so chilling that not even the ‘maid,’
Josefina, could keep him warm at night, not that she was any Abishag the
Shunemite, by then almost as withered an old crone as he was a matusa.
“But il
qua qua Galazzi-Lisi wasn’t done. Assisted by that matto Nuzzi from Naples, he had poor, already-rotting Genio,
embalmed three times – for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one must suppose – each time
with an oil more putrid than the last until the oil of the Spirit, thinking
itself gas, exploded, and the bits and pieces of the body of his holiness had
to be gathered, separated – poorly no, doubt – from the sick of the Swiss
Guards attending him and the whole mélange ladled into first of the three matryoshka
boxes – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – popes are buried in, gathered and three-times encased so they could
parade ‘him’ through the streets of Rome before burying his mess as deep as they
dared in St. Peter’s bowels.”
There it ends, Uncle Albert's letter, as abruptly as it began, though
with the usual closing: “Your poor
dead mother’s ancient friend . . .” and his signature, Albert.
Apparently, no
lessons are to be drawn. Good!
08.29.16
