La Casa degli Strani readings return to the Marsilio Ficino Library on Friday, February 28, 5:30 pm. This time Giuseppe Baldassarre and TeresaPaladin present "The Enchanted Traveler" by Nikolai Leskov.
PLOT: And it is the voice we return to hear-a "pleasant, mannered bass voice"-as soon as the "enchanted traveler" begins to recount the vicissitudes of his existence. We are on a boat sailing on Lake Ladoga, and the narrator appears to us as "a man of enormous stature, with a tanned and open face and thick wavy hair the color of lead." His adventures, even the most bewildering, and improbable, are never sought, but precipitate upon him like events of nature. Death touches him several times, but always to reject him. Life uses him for its own design, obscure to all but his dead mother, who had promised her son to God. Soon we realize that we could listen endlessly to the stories of this man "who had seen much" and did not pretend to know. His words stand out against the golden backdrop of the still and solemn old Kievan Rus', but the stories themselves are a swirling dust. Tramps and prostitutes, masters and merchants, princes and nomadic knights enter and leave the scene - and finally, etching itself into memory, the gypsy Gruša, resembling "a shining serpent."