Older readers will remember a man by the name of Antonio Feckawlo and if not, maybe their fathers will. They should remember Hanratty’s circus as well for that was his home since he departed Brindisi. Antonio’s demise occurred a few days before Christmas and that is why he is especially remembered at this time. Those who have a soft spot for Casanovas and waxed moustachios will toast his memory this Christmas and for many a Christmas to come, all going well. Antonio Feckawlo was a circus knife-thrower, roustabout and fribbling fracturer of a hundred female hearts.
Only last summer in a well-known hostelry in Ballybunion I encountered an elderly lady who happens to be a native of Limerick city. She recalled with ease her first sighting of the amorous Italian whose uncle Giuseppi Feckawlo was a Vatican monsignor and confidante of several popes or so they said. If you were to see Antonio’s features in the light of a setting sun against a backdrop made up of the cliffs of Doon overlooking the Ladies’ Strand in Ballybunion you would notice that the rakishness and the sinister scars had gone and that they had been replaced by features of great aristocratic charm.
Antonio, however, was far from being a man of piety and the Limerick woman who had first seen him some eighty years before (she is now ninety-three) was quite carried away at the time by his good looks. In fact she swooned with the many other females present as he flung knife after knife at the voluptuous body of Gina Moldoni his sometime companion of an out-house palliasse. Her real name was Gert O’Day. Antonio, a knife-thrower of the first water, never drew blood from a target. He drew blood, however, from several masculine noses and was responsible for the discoloration of many an eye. He also had a powerful voice and he was irresistible when he went on his knees and sang in broken tones to the memory of his lost love.
Then one night not long before Christmas the circus was performing in Tubbernamuckerry. The tent was full and the crowd responsive. All the acts had been cheered to an echo. After Gina Moldoni had fed the lions with their rations of minced donkey-meat she was returning to the main tent when she heard strange noises coming from the monkey house. She looked in and there was Antonio in the arms of the female slack wire walker and the pair scandalising the innocent baboons.
She was greatly taken aback to put it mildly. She had always known that he was a practitioner in the unchaste art of seduction but it was the first time she had caught him red-handed. She decided to do nothing just then. All she did was to fling the bucket and what was left of the minced donkey-meat at her rival before cursing the pair roundly and vowing that she would have her revenge on Antonio Feckawlo. The opportunity presented itself shortly afterwards. Just before the knife-throwing act which was one of the highlights of the programme Gina Moldoni decided that the time had come to put manners on her erring partner.
To a roll of drums Antonio stepped forward and threw the first of his twelve knives at Gina. It embedded itself in the wooden frame a mere two inches from her left ear. There was rapturous applause. The second knife embedded itself a solitary inch from Gina’s other ear. Again, there was a tumultuous cheer. The third knife landed two inches above the crown of her head and the fourth and fifth, in quick succession, implanted themselves at either side of her shapely throat. Now there were no cheers. Instead there were gasps. Antonio turned to acknowledge the gasps. He had experienced yells and hoots, sustained handclaps and cheers but gasps never!
As he bent to acknowledge this unprecedented tribute Gina Moldoni withdrew the knife at the left-hand side of her throat and stepped forward, to the astonishment of the onlookers. Antonio was so absorbed in the crowd’s reaction that he presumed the silence to be another aspect of audience participation. Gina raised the knife and aimed for the right heel of her unsuspecting partner. The deadly missile missed its target but what it did not miss was the extended left buttock of the knife-thrower. It embedded itself firmly in the solid flesh and even when Antonio leaped forward from the pain and shock, the knife remained rooted where it had lodged.
Gina Moldoni, in the middle of the consternation, made good her escape. As she exited through a side flap in the canvas she was met by the trick cyclist who had already tied her luggage to the carrier. He bore her on the bar of the bike to a place far from the hills and vales of Tubbernamuckerry.
Rumour had it that the pair fled the country and ended up their days as itinerant evangelists in South Carolina.
After Gina’s departure a score of females erupted from ringside seats. Between them they managed to extract the foot-long weapon from the great lover’s Brindisian bum. He would sustain other wounds before he was drowned while attempting to evade his enemies as he crossed the Feale River near Listowel while that august waterway was in full flood.
‘He never deserved to drown,’ said a cuckolded north Kerryman, ‘not while there was rope in plenty to hang the hoor.’
This was not a nice thing to say but it should not be taken too seriously since they are greatly given to hyperbole in north Kerry.
‘When he died,’ said the elderly lady I encountered in Ballybunion, ‘the city of Limerick gave itself over to mourning.’
Apparently, its female population was inconsolable while many of its male population regretted that he had not been sexually incapacitated long before his demise.
There was no funeral because there was no body. Some said that it had been eaten by sharks halfway through the Atlantic. Others, pathological liars as well, maintained that his body had been de-boned before being chopped up and minced for the three elderly lions who made up most of the menagerie of Hanratty’s circus. It was widely rumoured at the time that they consumed each other after they had polished off the baboons.
One of my late informants also informed me that Antonio Feckawlo always behaved like a gentleman until a member of the opposite sex appeared on the scene. He could not and would not stay clear of females, attached or unattached, and they, for their part, would not stay clear of him. In another age, a film would be made about him and his exploits. Like all great lovers, he was deeply misunderstood by his detractors but not by those he loved.
Let us hope that he is with his sainted uncle Giuseppi in the high halls of heaven for, all else aside, he was a lover of the old school and so, let us toast him.