Word: gourdfuls
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Requiem set last week-in the locker-room area under the grandstands at Randalls Island stadium-Gleason was finding out that moviemaking on location can be spartan. Against freezing temperatures, heat came from charcoal briquettes in braziers. Cast and crew were breathing contrails. Gleason sat, like a huge frostbitten gourd, in a camp chair labeled THE GREAT...
Amoral as a chimpanzee, as empty of brains as a gourd. Cecilia possesses at 17 the troubling sexuality that inevitably unhinges Moravia's men. She is the mistress of a 65-year-old painter who has a studio down the hall. When the old painter dies of a heart attack (induced, say the neighbors, by too much Cecilia), it is Dino's turn. What follows is the old sexual war that Moravia has refought too many times. In scenes so explicit as to make publishers of cheap paperbacks slaver for the reprint rights, Dino dies a thousand deaths...
...down his stony cheeks. "You have fed me," he says then, "and you have even made me laugh. For that I shall give you what no man has ever had before." A spring leaps out of the ground, and with its occult water, Death replenishes Macario's gourd. "With this water," he says solemnly, "you can cure any illness-if I don't object...
Clutching the gourd, Macario runs back to life, runs on to fame, to wealth, to power. All the things he never had, the gift of healing gives him. But in his noon of glory he is suddenly struck down; and in the darkling and poetic end of all, he learns that the paths of glory lead to the same lowly grave he would in any case have lain in. Yet it might have been otherwise. "Macario," Death says sadly, "you misunderstood the gift." He misunderstood the gift of life-the turkey, which is meant to be shared with other...
...lined streets were mostly deserted except for a few trudging, overcoated citizens. But beneath the icy surface of Paraguay there was a thawing new ray of hope. Men whispered word of it across the marble tabletops of kerosene-heated coffeehouses, over steaming mate, the herb tea sipped from a gourd through a metal straw. The hope, still dim but voiced seriously for the first time, is that outside pressure-chiefly from the U.S.-will eventually force the dictator...