from community centers, the Braille Institute, or were just volunteers from USC, UCLA or Santa Monica College. No one I ever spoke with, however, claimed to know him well, though more than a few were willing to offer me their opinions.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤOne student believed he was certifiably mad. Another actress, who had spent a summer reading to him, thought Zampanô was a romantic. She had come over one morning and found him in “a terrible way.”
ㅤㅤㅤㅤ“At first I assumed he was drunk, but the old guy never drank, not even a sip of wine. Didn’t smoke either. He really lived a very austere life. Anyway he wasn’t drunk, just really depressed. He started crying and asked me to leave. I fixed him some tea. Tears don’t frighten me. Later he told me it was heart trouble. ‘Just old heart-ache matters,’ he said. Whoever she was, she must have been really special. He never told me her name.”
ㅤㅤㅤㅤAs I eventually found out, Zampanô had seven names he would occasionally mention: Beatrice, Gabrielle, Anne-Marie, Dominique, Eliane, Isabelle and Claudine. He apparently only brought them up when he was disconsolate and for whatever reason dragged back into some dark tangled time. At least there’s something more realistic about seven lovers than one mythological Helen. Even in his eighties, Zampanô sought out the company of the opposite sex.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤCoincidence had had no hand in arranging for all his readers to be female. As he openly admitted: “there is no greater comfort in my life than those soothing tones cradled in a woman’s words.”
ㅤㅤㅤㅤExcept maybe his own words.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤZampanô was in essence—to use another big word—a graphomaniac. He scribbled until he died and while he came close a few times, he never finished anything, especially the work he would unabashedly describe as either his masterpiece or his precious darling. Even the day before he failed to appear in that dusty courtyard, he was dictating long discursive passages, amending previously written pages and restructuring an entire chapter. His mind never ceased branching out into new territories. The woman who saw him for the last time, remarked that “whatever it was he could never quite address in himself prevented him from ever settling. Death finally saw to that.”
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