Then they approached the lion's cage. "Careful because..." I began to say to a little man in a suit but Papa smiled at him from top to bottom - physically and morally - because, because of Africa and all the rest, he had a certain familiarity with lions.
"Nice cat..." he said extending an arm over the bars.
"Grauff" replied the nice cat extending a paw.
At that moment a little monkey jumped from somewhere and glided over Antonio Sanfelice's head. Our gestures to free Antonio were probably not the right ones because, the more we fidgeted, the more the monkey seemed determined to stay where it was and continued to go through Antonio's hair with incisive energy.
With a simple but right gesture, the little man in overalls grabbed the monkey, caressed it, put it around his neck and said: "...be careful, because this lion has just killed its tamer and since then no one has given it anything to eat."
From the little man in the overalls our gazes turned to Papa: he stood rigid, one arm dangling forward with five deep marks dripping blood. Lots of blood.
With Gianfranco I had remained a little behind the group that surrounded Antonio Sanfelice. I passed a baby elephant, it raised its trunk and with a sharp blow it lifted Gianfranco by the butt and slammed him to the ground. "Luckily he's small..." I murmured to Gianfranco lying like a bearskin at my feet.
Nobody paid attention to Gianfranco. Everyone looked at Papa's arm speechless. "Disinfectant, now," my mother suggested. It was not for nothing that she had been a Red Cross nurse during the war.
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