Mario Puzo: Fools die

Finally I accepted the fact that I was not a magician anymore. But what the hell. I was still alive and that’s more than I could say for my brother, Artie, or Janelle or Osano. And Cully and Malomar and poor Jordan. I understood Jordan now. It was very simple. Life was too much for him. But not for me. Only fools die.

Was I a monster then that I didn’t grieve, that I wished so much to stay alive? That I could sacrifice my only brother, my only beginning, and then Osano and Janelle and Cully and never even grieve for them and only weep for one? That I could be comforted with the world I had built for myself?

How we laugh at primitive man for his worry and terror of all the charlatan tricks of nature, and how we ourselves are so terrified of the terrors and guilts that roar in our own heads. What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.

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Merlin, Merlin. Surely a thousand years have passed and you must finally be awake in your cave, putting on your star-covered conical hat to walk through a strange new world. And poor bastard, with your cunning magic, did it do you any good to sleep that thousand years, your enchantress in her grave, both our Arthurs turned to dust?

Or do you have one last magic spell that can work? A terrible long shot, but what’s that to a gambler? I still have a stack of black chips and an itch for terror.

I suffer, but I still live. It’s true that I may be a sort of phantom in life, but I know my beginning and I know my end. It is true that I am an X in an indeterminate equation, the X that will terrify mankind as it voyages through a million galaxies. But no matter. That X is the rock upon which I stand.

Mario Puzo was born on Manhattan ’s West Side in a neighborhood known for decades as Hell’s Kitchen. His first books, The Fortunate Pilgrim (“a minor classic” NY Times ) and Dark Arena , brought him critical acclaim, but it was publication of The Godfather in March, 1969, that catapulted him into the front ranks of American authors. The Godfather is available in a Signet edition.