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| Nigella 60 x 50 cm acryl on canvas |
THREE FATES
A woman speaks
French
to her
husband then slaps his face.
He
understands nothing. How do you reason
with hurricanes,
the fury of natural calamity?
Their three
sons grow up strange in a handful
of
provincial cities. They move out. One is
barely
employed; a stalled novelist who keeps writing
or
half-writing the same story: a large
peasant
woman in garden clogs storms into a rustic kitchen
angry about
something no male in the family can fathom.
Soup
dribbles down Papa’s unshaven chin, he stutters—
and that’s
as far as it goes. A novel about inarticulate fear?
The
occasional obscurity of rage? Okay, his girlfriend asks,
what about
the plot, conflict, point of fucking view? WHAT
HAPPENS ON
PAGE TWO, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE? His brother Marcel,
a flamenco
artiste at a casino in Atlantic City, is secretly
vain about
his ass; Jean, the third and youngest brother, is a
pipe fitter
in Toledo, Spain, and has backed into a passion
for gothic cathedrals,
wondering what plumbing was like back then.
One day
they return home to mother, whose hand’s still aching
from twenty-years
back, her French as opaque as ever. On the occasion
of her
death she leaves each of her sons an extremely long, gorgeous
knitted
scarf, her life’s work. They wear the scarves
everywhere.
Until they start to choke. Then they understand.
