A lovely opportunity to know more about the childhood of our admired Radamés:
Respected authorities, teachers, janitors, family members of this incredible educational institution, acquaintances, enemies, people who I used to know but since it’s been such a long time I can no longer call them friends, loved ones, hated ones, pupils….
“That’s an example of how my loquacious and… (some inkblots prevent us from accurately transcribing the other epithet used) mother used to begin her speeches in my sepia times of primary school – and erectile – days.
“Obviously, I’m being far too generous when I say used, given the fact that during my school years my mother was only able to deliver just one of those memorable disasters usually referred to as parents’ speeches; soon after her first and last failed attempt she was admitted to a famous psychiatric clinic situated in the Isle of My, after the sensible and prudent opinion voiced by the family doctor, Daniel Scianeus.
“Probably because destiny sometimes plays some tricks on us – raping our desires and hopes –, the mental institution doomed to become my mother’s final home was dead closed. Thence, marooned on such a stranded island, she began to row, but only after having built a precarious floating device with the sole help of both of her bare hands, an exploit which was obviously performed both before climbing aboard the humble and shaky raft, and also before the rowing.
“She rowed for days, which were disguised as centuries, and she rowed for nights of millenary density, until she finally reached a certain rock which at the time she obviously ignored that itwas the Island of Huatilepasoc: a place in which, after many trials and tribulations, Mother founded a supermarket chain and became a millionaire several times over as a result of her entrepeneurialendeavours; but the vice prevailed… and the once forgotten endless stream of words reappeared in her mouth during the opening vocalization which was uttered during a new store opening of what was soon to become the last branch of her supermarketing Babylon, proving to be – once again – an almost fatal obsession: speeches.
“She later confessed to me in a pitiful and pathetic letter that she only became impregnated of me just to have the chance to give a proper school speech; such was the density of her obsession in order to fulfil that aching compulsion in the guise of desire and lust for meaningless words; something we know today as politician, or philosopher.
“After my graduation from college, a new task or mission became fixed within her mind and within her uterus: to become pregnant again; yet the ever present fate – which by now had become pretty damn good at raping and destroying wishes – wanted that all her circumstantial lovers were sterile. Almost half of those utilitarian ill-fated men were promptly discarded given her amazing ability to realize whether she was pregnant or not by the mere smell of her right foot’s pinkie toe.
“In those times of pre-artificial fertilization methods, she had one last legal choice: adoption. She tried to adopt any given orphan under one condition: he or she had to be able to be reinstated in the educational system. Millions of dollars were blown to the wind after many promises of finding the ripe child ended up being nothing but rotten assurances; when those supposed to be trusted bribes ended up in dead ends; even the roguest and impurest child traders took advantage of such a speechy obsession. Money, in this case, was not the answer. The Babylonian Supermarket Emporium went astray. Shares had to be sold at ridiculously low prices in order to get fresh liquidity for the bribes to the worldwide adoption agencies, which, like a common abusive Catholic priest, were proving to have an endless appetite when it came to helpless children.
“Once her fortune had been dilapidated in corrupted claims, eternal bureaucratic procedures, barrister’s fees, and a never ending etc., she risked her very freedom in order to gain that holy grail she was after: a little schoolboy or schoolgirl that would allow her to step up to the podium and improvise that oral masterpiece that she had been composing throughout those hellish years of search and bribes, of rotten and ripe, of Catholics and feasts, of stocks and options, of rowing and adopting. Each word had been polished, each pause had been already established during her endless thick nights, each cough from the audience foreseen with its necessary silence, each possible deafening feedback due to a faulty microphone, each clap that would – at least for a second – enthrone her in the parnassus of those masterful exponents of the articulatory exercise of word uttering.
“The speech was ready; all she needed was the living key to enter that realm made of notebooks and pencils, of rubbers and morning farts, of pyjamas under the uniform, of ephemeral loves and of undershirts used as handkerchiefs, serving as a canvas for mucus and other bodily substances.
“With her last coins, she bought a plane ticket to that oriental land where, according to some friends she had acquired through the smell of bribal bills who happened to work in the black market of schoolchildren, stealing a primary schoolboy was a piece of cake. Indeed it was a piece of cake, but it was a portion that if eaten, would probably make you spend your life locked up in a soon to become inhabitable bathroom. As I am writing these lines, I can begin to relate my lavatorial issues and sitting preferences to those dreadful events in Mother’s life experience.
“Needless to say the enterprise was doomed from the beginning. Poorly fed and nearly dehydrated, still delusional and anguished at the prospect of forgetting her master speech, the first and last attempt to get a schoolboy was her final sentence. Locked up in a Bangkok cell made of iron, concrete, excrement, blood and oblivion, she was last seen while attempting to deliver her final and heartfelt oration to some inmates in the laundry room; dragged away by the prison guards, she kept shouting in a maniacal way Ritorna Vincitor! Nobody ever knew of her again.”
Later, Radamés would confess to his friend and brother in arms Abu Kasem, that his exquisite bathroom preferences and his difficulty in letting the intestinal waste see the light of day or night in any other bathroom suite that was not his, was probably caused by his mother’s mental disorder and her obsession with school speeches that compelled her to undertake the failed child adopting mission. He said:
“For a man, the mere act of bowel exercise is like giving birth; though not a newborn, something is formed and created within our very selves, and such a solid or concrete creation abandons its labyrinthine vessel, never to return (at least through that very same orifice); but the joy of art proves to be of an utmost generosity, because the product of such a detachment exercise leaves us not without giving us some sense of bliss, joy and pleasure. One (we, all living creatures) comes from water and then grows into chaotic multiplicity, the other goes to it as a unity and then, fragmented, falls as a dying multiplicity. If we are to call ourselves Men, then, we have to follow the falling’s reverse example: from many, to one. Some scarce centimetres are the distance between waste and life. Death and Hope. What is not useful and what could become useful… or not. The reverse metaphor”.
Anyway, the question that I’m interested in pouring inside the sacred book is not what you’ve just read, but another one: the abortion issue, a thorny subject indeed (2). Such a theme is so hard and rough that my hands are beginning to bleed profusely as I’m writing these very lines. Dear reader, please do give me a moment so I can clean and stop the bleeding… (to be continued).
(1) If the reader is asking why the footnote number 2 is in effect number 1, and this very same number 1 has nothing to do with the present account, the reader should realise before even asking such a question that he is assuming beforehand that simply because a question can be formulated – hence asked – it must be answered, or even that it ought to have a proper reply for such an inquiry. The fact is that not all questions are out there to be answered, and not all answers belong to a question; yet, there are answers that are still waiting for the appropriate questions.
(2) The adjective thorny is used due to the heated debates that such an issue inspires, and not because the foetus has scales or thorns when the pregnancy is voluntarily interrupted.