Mussolini's Fiat, parts 1799 - 1802

1799. It was not until some time later when Proctor came across original Coromo paintings at the resort that he saw the connection. He was not offended and he didn’t feel taken advantage of because he knew instinctively that a Coromo should sell for several thousand dollars, with or without axle grease.

1800. Dr. Buboni had listened with great patience to this entire convoluted story beginning with Coromo, going into detail about Proctor Crock, and then veering off to Syracuse, and into the ideas of some junkyard owner. It probably seemed to him that the subject of the story, Coromo, would never find his way to New York, so he decided to interrupt at a pause in the narrative and say something about the monasteries and garbage men.

1801. “I was struck,” he said, “by your remarks about how monks might be affected by changing fashions so that someday we would see monks dressed in suit but suits tied at the waste with a piece of tattered rope. Put that way it does create a comic anachronistic image, but yet it is actually hard to imagine monks affected by the gradually changing fashion in clothing. Not only that, but I think we all desire to see them remain dressed in their traditional garb.”

1802. Monks are somehow a different matter. One hardly ever sees monks out in the street, the only time I have ever seen a few of them was in Rome a few years ago, and that was quite close to the Vatican. And even though I was just a few blocks form the Pope himself, still I could not convince myself that they were real flesh and blood monks, and I started to look around to see if perhaps people were shooting a movie nearby, and most likely they were extras.