Enough of this Twaddle! The Floyd's the Thing!

Right! Onward, dear reader; let us leave old Ambiguo, swaddled in his gut-restricting fat pants and swinging from an impostering Profundo's prow, let us leave these two-bit hams and cut to the very quick of the issue itself.
"Look, you said, or at least I thought you did somewhere in the midst of all that nonsense, that your two old farts managed to actually get their hands on a couple of frames. Did you or did you not? Spit it out, you bathtub admiral!"
Calm yourself, gentle reader, for yes, there is proof in the tapioca. My Italian fat men did indeed come through, and in spades; here are the photos as received by me, sparingly cleaned and ready to be dismantled and shipped for closer and inspection and eventual restoration. This Floyd came courtesy of Poltrone, the hatchet-nosed old bit of doggerel, found in an rubble of an abandoned meatpacking warehouse in the Testaccio district of Rome, alongside the burnt out hulk of an ancient Vespa Sprint 150 and the dessicated remains of what is now vintage beef.


One wonders how such a paragon of geometry in motion could have found its near end in such a disreputable heap. Whats more, Poltrone tells me that the warehouses as they are now are on the verge of being turned into twee modern art museums. Oh, modern man! Do not look abroad for new jewels when those of old lie tarnished below your feet! Floyd Number Two, forwarded along by the scarcely recognizeable and dutifully chastened Ambiguo, makes me want to clasp him to my chest and pinch his swollen cheeks. THIS, my friends, this is a Floyd. Note the frame angles, the intricate lug-work. Perhaps a bit difficult to make out in this dim lighting, but upon arrival, attention shall be lavished upon it. Poetry in motion (to be). His story has still to be told in full, but Ambiguo reminds me at chance intervals of the cunning insight I saw burning in him at our first meeting. He sends this Floyd on from Bologna, meekly traveling south and away from dangerous dumplings, where he caught the Floydian scent from a wizened old reed of a man who laid a finger along his nose while selling a restorative bichiere of plonk in Lo Nagro, at the terminus of Viale Schiavonia. Of course, Floyd found and wine at hand, one cannot count on Sgnr. Ambiguo for wanton tourism.

In Which We Regress, But Only a Teeny Twiddle

In the filmy hours of the morning, the world squashy and without corners as filtered through the cat on one's face, it is easy to find, along the freshly mowed walk of conversation, enticing brambly holes in the hedge through which one's thoughts may wander, straying from the Floyd at hand.
Such, with just such a load-bearing feline tucked in this humble narrator's armpit, was the case when last we did tout in terms elegiac and parables profound, the nature of the Floyd. But be of good cheer! dear reader, for a new light dawns and begs us gather at the foremast, bearing words that finally, like Ahab's final pod of whales, give us cause for Hope.
I have received a Floyd.
I have received Two Floyds!
Two Floyds from the past, caked in the sad patina of nearly 40 years disuse. I received a cable some two weeks ago from Messrs. Poltrone and Ambiguo, opened it with trembling hands, and could scarce believe my eyes at this news, glorious beyond hope!
Apparently Ambiguo thought the search might proceed propitiously in the northern climes, and thus rationalizing a prodigious appetite for dumplings to be cunningly purchased on the project's Euro, he plowed northeast, to Trentino Alto Adige. Oh, but I forgive him, the old wurstle, for in his stomach lies a device more accurate than the truest of pidgeons. Try as he might to block out loyalty to the Floydian cause, a sausage in his mouth and a slice of rye bread in each ear, his heart was too true. Staggering out of the first trattoria he had found, bloated and wheezing, leaking at the seams, he pattered to rest on a bench along the main boulevard, and promptly fell asleep in the sun. He had, by the subsequent written accounts, ceased to be of this world, borne along on waves of shnitzel as hosts of pretzels sang him to his rest, and was as communicative as a lamp post when prodded with the polizia's truncheon. "The gentleman's impressive girth," stated the report filed by Sgnr. Montana, "made his removal and ultimate disposal a rather fiddly (trans. 'intricato') procedure. Profundo was summoned."
Here, dear reader, I almost lost my pants, for as you no doubt know very well by now, a certain Profundo plays not a small part in the very reason we are here in the first place! A relative, perhaps, a fugitive from space and time?
No.
Profundo was simply another very fat policeman of wine cask proportions, who seemed to have the most accumulated knowledge of moving large objects. He arrived with sling shimmed to the front of his Ape and after much huffing and puffing, succeeded in harnessing the mountainous bulk of Ambiguo to his three wheeled chariot. Tottering, spinning at times on two wheels, the cask wove his way to the the Ape car's home, the alley behind the station, and, rather than attend to the discomfitting task of unbuckling the leviathan so ignominiously hoisted to the crafts wobbling bow, proposed lunch.

In Which We Meet Profundo Himself, and Lament the Deplorable State of Floyds' Two

We look in on our hero as dawn slips unnoticed out from within the water barrel, where it has been sulking about for some hours, a doleful moon-faced calf. Shards of cold sun clatter like a spilled alphabet on the barn door, metal ringing out as a sting through fouled off forearms, and inside, the ghost of Profundo curses sotto voce, realizing a night spent on the floor.
An hour passes, slowly, and as the cluster flies shake the torpor from this late September of their numbered days, Profundo warms in a bar of sun, changes from a man cut from thick morning valley mist to a color through a waterfall, to a wafting shade suspended above a teacup, and then disappears completely. The fat late-summer flies flap like grapes at the window, while a hollow sound much like a bicycle leaving its place under the eaves of a shed follows the sigh of the door closing on itself, and the last cicadas' rasp to life, slow fingernails ratcheting across an emery board.

Like the hazy shadow of the long-gone conductor of old number 99, seen filing his nails and setting his pocket watch in the golden suppertime sun of the dark thirty, the teller grows susceptible to the gauzy qualities of these legends not fully passed on. A rear wheel spinning round the corner and out of sight along the olive trees, a rusted jack knife quivering quarter-blade deep in a stump by the trestle; only too well do we know that these men, these objects, did once cast shadows. And if, armed with this historic knowledge of things tangible, we thrill to the feeling of doubting desire and temper our blind logic, do we know surely they do not cast them still?

Facts remain, unpleasant altogether they might be. Peppe Profundo died too soon, and no longer inhabits corporeally the streaking Floyd that Verner fit to his lean frame.

But the pictures remain, as well do the stories, and it is no great effort, upon squinting the eyes, to see once again outlined against the sun, hat turned backward on his head, Profundo's back dipping side to side as he winds up the hill and banks off to the left, off among the goats and the goatherds of the Sardinian countryside.