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The
Golden Mean PAGE
TWO: The idea of one of her sacred sons falling in love with a genetically inferior Australian was too much for Nonna Mentina, and she stalked the girl with the word free in her surname for months. My aunt would find her skulking in the dress-racks of the clothing store in which she worked, hoping to catch my aunt in a compromising position with a customer or perhaps dealing smack. When confronted, my grandmother would affect total ignorance of English and back away, waving her hands, squawking and undoubtedly wishing my aunt were one of her chickens. She would later complain to my uncle that his wife's Anglo-Saxon incompetence endangered her grandchildren's lives and that the (impeccable) house was a sty. If my aunt dared criticize my grandmother, my uncle would rise, a tsunami, and defend his mother like the First Amendment. I had no such problems as I played the daughter in the real-life Italian production of The Royal Tenenbaums and was thus immune from scolding. Live with lovers, wear rented stockings, smoke ganja with rock stars, pierce my nose: nobody cared. My job was to be clever and that was all. You're a witch! I cried as Nonna Mentina chased me around her little bungalow wielding the small saucepan in which she fried the most delicious potatoes in the world. You never bought my father a single toy when he was a child and you hit him! I was too young and too fast and she was breathless by the time we reached the living room. You -- she would begin, you -- but there was a flicker in her eyes that spoke of an affection she had never been allowed to show. Her own mother had died when she was a child, you see, and she had to look after her drunken father and raise her siblings alone. She shared two bottles of wine with her father every day at lunchtime and every household chore was hers. After she married, she told him that she was leaving Italy for good. She visited his house the day before she left, the same day he committed suicide by hurling himself down the stairs while she was eating lunch. I imagine her hearing a thud and shout, the crack of bones, pausing with a piece of bread or glass in her small hand, and then running out to find her father dying of malevolence at the foot of the stairs. She must have hated him. I met her sister years later during a European spree. Zia Pnin -- somewhere Nabokov is nodding -- was a real potato of a woman with a puff-toad face, few teeth and two white swinging plaits: she looked like a Star Wars senator -- not Padme Amidala, but Orn Free Taa, the Twi'lek Senator from the Loyalist Committee -- and spoke an unintelligible dialect. My grandfather's sister was just as weird. A refined woman, she lived in a pristine apartment near the Alps with her married lover and a collection of life-sized stuffed toys. By the white silk sofas and potted palms, a towering Topolino (Mickey Mouse), Paperino (Donald Duck), and idiotically-voiced Topo Gigio (big-eared and whiskered, decked out like a gondolier) crazily staring into space. She thought them cute. I was half-scared to death. (I feared they might try to jump me in the hall.) Every Gambotto in the world is originally from the same village in Piedmont. (For those who swoon over the moonlight and roses of the Italian language: my surname means "short stumpy legs"). My aunt elected to be related to these freaks, but I was without choice and wished I could have stayed away. My father once took me to a mountaintop restaurant with Ugo, his best friend. I returned from the pristine blue-tiled Turkish bathroom and whispered: Papa, they haven't built the toilet yet. My aunt was also dragged -- if by my sentimental uncle -- up mountains and to farms, to churches and the House of the Plush Monsters and the conference rooms of Senator Pnin, and sat through dinners at which everyone spoke Italian. She was polite and answered when she was called Rita even though her name is Ruth. (Italians cannot pronounce th and thus she was called Rita or Root, which in the Australian vernacular means fuck as in, Fancy a root?) Nonna Mentina once received a call from a man who assured her that he wanted nothing better than to penetrate her forcefully, and all night long. Bewildered by the unfamiliar English, my grandmother diligently listened. When she heard the word root, she cried out -- no, no, you have wrong number! -- and gave him the number of my aunt. Your mother-in-law told me to call, the prank caller said, laughing deeply before launching into stream-of-consciousness obscenities. Auntie Drac screamed when she walked headlong into the headless chickens swinging from my grandmother's bathroom ceiling and, covered in blood that time, struggled to deal with my grandmother's old world guile; the sister of Senator Pnin was a formidable opponent. Nonna Mentina was wrong in undermining my good aunt, but at least she was an equal opportunity hater: she also detested my mother. In the photographs of my parents' glamorous wedding -- they were married in a great cathedral by the Monsignor -- my aunt is smart in eyeliner and winklepickers and Breton hat with pleated tulle (she looked like Dorian Leigh in her heyday or an Edith Head model) but my grandmother is scowling and, like a coffin, draped in black. She stands apart, a vial of emotional plutonium, clutching her purse with a bag-snatcher's zeal, her curls plastered to her head like those of a Caesar's, beside her spectral husband and his distant smile. Unlike my aunt, Nonna Mentina had no real spiritual feeling but went through all the motions of Catholicism and really loved a curse. I seem to remember a piece of lace she demurely wore over her hair and crucifixes and a depiction or depictions of Jesus, whom she misunderstood as an enthusiastic advocate of constant suffering. My aunt, on the other hand, sincerely believed the teachings of the Church. She wanted gentleness. This combination of strict Roman Catholicism and her natural -- and irresistible -- wilderness sensibilities was unusual, and the era wasted her. Raised to please, she shelved her own preferences until middle age, when she rebelled. She told my grandmother to go to hell. (It only took her twenty years.) She started classes. A handsome retired football player flirted with her but she told him to go away. She began working at a childcare center for twelve dollars an hour and came home with funny stories about toddlers, and sand from the sandpit in her hair. When my uncle bangs the table with his fist and howls for food, she does not tip the plate over his head as I would, but graciously serves him and remarks that she was not placed upon this earth to be his slave. He grumbles and snarls a little and rolls his eyes, but is bereft without his leggy wife of three decades. When she was late home after searching with her daughter for a bridal gown that did not look like an avalanche in Gstaad (complete with casualties), he was furious. He does not like the world without her. I was amazed when I first discovered that they actually trudge to church and back each week. You're kidding me! I cried. And then: Are you kidding me? But it was true. And here was I, gradually evolving into a species of Buddhist, absorbed by levels of being, intermittently studying reincarnation, speaking to my brother's spirit, meditating on a petal, listening to my clairvoyant friend tell me of the angels -- some of them ten feet tall -- who flock to Tao temples, and all this in my cowboy hat or Jolly Roger beanie. My aunt took my hand after a dinner she had cooked for ten. I had demolished the prosciutto and Fibonacci-sequence artichokes and discreetly fingered the chocolate from the eclairs. We were left at the table with the plates. The others were watching television and talking. I can't imagine what you've been through, she quietly said. I stopped -- the simplicity of her statement pierced my heart -- and I looked at her, this woman of God, my malachite-eyed Australian aunt. Maurits Cornelis Escher, whose spiral staircases echo throughout the worlds of mathematics and high art, once said: The consistency of the phenomena around us, order, regularity, cyclical repetitions and renewals, have started to speak to me more and more strongly all the time. The awareness of their presence brings me repose and gives me support. In my pictures I try to bear witness that we are living in a beautiful, ordered world, and not in a chaos without standards. My aunt, who knows nothing of numbers, understands. All she needed to know was that I had lost my brother, and she was there.
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Dainty
in furs, she swore like a crack whore in withdrawal.
