31: Genesis

Rousseau and Marengo Part 1 --------------------------- Tommaso Marengo came from a notable family of artists, writers, musicians, architects; you name a creative industry and you will find a Marengo. Inscribed in stone on many of the country’s finest institutions, patrons of the arts and learning.. they were not so much concerned with keeping their finger on the pulse, as remaining the very pulse itself… Rosario Marengo (nee Parana), spawned where the streams converged, was an outsider in the inner circle of the Marengo clan, which prided itself on producing, nurturing, expelling and re-imbibing a whole gamut of eminently acceptable outsiders, and Massimo, her husband in all but inclination, was one of the most unacceptable of these acceptables. Each child born into this veritable artistic establishment came with a gilded guarantee. Inspected by the elders, who could gage with terrifying accuracy the spirit of the newborn child, they would write a single word - an enigma to unfold as the infant developed - on a little card, sealed with a wax emblem, and hand it to the mother with a nod and a knowing smile. So much had been spoken of this smile that Rosario imagined it would be warm, wise, welcoming, like the smiles she saw drawn on the faces of ‘men of the cloth,’ with their slow, sloth like movements, that shed an odour of grace, though perfumed otherwise. But when the elders filed in, gaunt, with twisted limbs and backs bowed, like over ripe fruit fallen from untended trees, she saw them more as a teary eyed Rublev trinity than an opulent caravan of magi; their heavy listless eyes brimming with an unconscionable melancholy. In silence they inspected the child. Some nods, a few brief glances, and that was it. No smiles graced the child. When Rosario opened the card, she felt as if she were about to unleashed a current of chance so fierce that it would drag her along in its wake, and she braced herself for the onrush… but like a pebble dropped into a deep well, an emptiness sounded … for all she found inscribed was an inverted question mark. She stared blankly at the child bundled in a silk scarf, the black trim curving around the feet and up in a just line to a small wailing globule of a head, already black with hair. But blacker still were those unseeing eyes, all pupil and no sky. Without the backing of the elders, Tommaso had no path through the world. No affectionately bestowed riches, no artfully itinerised holidays, no introductions made to the shining, and not so shining, no plush scholarships to ever plusher environs. No. Rosario by association, would be shunned, and it were as if little Tommaso himself had been the agent of her untimely felling. This middling madonna of the small trees, held Tommaso at a distance from then on, and with an ever brooding look of suspicion, she waited for the pall to be drawn. It was not until her second child, Mirella, who in all hopelessness had gained a firm and flourishing POET from the elders, that Rosario was released from the cursed image of those six evil eyes mutely meting out fate. In fact, she came to see in their bent bodies and boundless gazes the wily craft of old village tailors who, through having measured, cut and sewn a century or so of suits between them, could with a mere glance at a silhouette, stitch a trick with such precision and elegance that it could turn an urchin into an emperor. Mirella was followed by Francesca the fledgling Philosopher, and soon after that, Dorian, the dramatist to be, and with each brightening of the family’s future, Tommaso’s interrogative anchored itself more firmly in the shifting silt. He was written off like an ink stained blouse. He spent his time watching movies - that he imitated in awe - and acting up for the attentions of his three adoring siblings, who found in him a delightful distraction to their otherwise dry days of obligation. When the family embarked on a Grand Tour in ‘the old style’ to develop what the Elders called: “An apt sensitivity to the exception, to tune and train their voices to speak multitudes,” they were pained to leave the sanctuary of this saintly fool. As they followed the whims of the Elders, who had drawn out detailed plans for each child’s development, Tommaso was gradually forgotten. Like an old piece of much loved but eminently impractical furniture, he had been left at home, feeding on porridge and brioche… Who cared what fodder when there were no appearances to keep. He spent much of his time at the community centre, now overrun by a theatre group steered by an ageing mime artist named Fantoft, who was not lost to the irony that by giving a voice to the voiceless, he had cut out their tongues, so to speak, for all of the performances were done completely in silence. Watching the residents cum actors practice their lines (sans mots) he was amazed by Fantoft’s ability to draw out these characters as if he were summoning spirits from beyond. And this wasn’t far off. For as Fantoft emphatically effused: To reach the beyond you not only have to believe, but you have to actualise; you have to manifest. So Tommaso, with spit resolve, tried for a role in the latest production. But he was hopeless. He could facsimilate to the nth degree, but to push through to the remaining 12; to move beyond words and into the shining light of reification, this was beyond his ken, and so, without much ado, he was banished to the earthier organs of the theatre. But then one day, acting as lighting monkey for a performance of Electra he had lost his footing on the uneven planks and fallen from the truss, like a supra-stage Palinurus, in front of an audience who seemed to inhale the room’s quantity of oxygen with one gasp, and who then - when Tommaso stood up, brushed himself off, bowed, and walked off stage - erupted in an applause so unchecked that it sliced through the air like a katana through a silk scarf. What should have amounted to an amateur death during an equally amateur production turned out to be a lightning strike illuminating a path out of the labyrinth. Old Fantoft, from the stage wings, bore witness to this sudden transformation with a sly grin and an assenting noggin. Tommaso claimed that as he was falling, he had imagined an oversized feather pillow lying on the stage below ready to break his fall and that when he landed on this imaginary pillow he could actually feel the feathers pricking out from the off white pillow case and he could smell the fowl plumage in a dense odiferous assault of his nostrils. As he stood up, to get rid of the feathers that had escaped and clung to his clothing, he brushed himself off before exiting the stage. But none of this was detectable by the audience; all that they saw was a man fall and a man rise again, as miraculously earnest as it was unplanned. Later staging a dramatised adaptation of a Kharms story, in which he threw himself out of a window, picked himself up, climbed up to the window again, threw himself out, and picked himself up again, ad infinitum, the family watched with mixed emotions. Rosario and Massimo flinched on every impact, whilst Mirella, Dorian and Frencesca bounced in their seats, unable to contain their excitement, eager to see how he would fall next time. After the production, Fantoft approached Tommaso’s parents with an uncharacteristic nervousness Effusing about his talents, and claiming that he was quite possibly a genius when it came to falling, Massimo’s scepticism brimmed over into scorn, replying that any idiot can fall. Fantoft, on a losing bet, tried to convince them, saying that if anyone else had attempted to stage this play, the Barra D’Or would have had to bar it’s doors for lack of beds. Continuing on his flight of fanciful wittering he claimed that only a man mown down by a Kalashnikov could fall as well as Tommoso. He could fall like a horse struck by lightening; He could fall like a sunflower beheaded by a scythe. Christ, he could even fall like a mourning widow hit by an oncoming commuter train. And with that, he made an offer to take Tommaso off their hands and to train him to the full extent of his abilities. Checking himself, as if he had said too much, been too ingratiating, or too musty in his affectation of formality, he watched as Rosario and Massimo conferred. The performance seemed to have had the opposite effect on them, convincing them of anything but his genius. Returning to him in apparent resignation, she said, shooing away the air with her hand: Take him, take him, just make something of him, anything. And with that, like an old nag, Tommaso had been gifted to an ex-clown with a chipped shoulder and nothing to lose but the glints crowning his cracked mandible.