Bathing

Submerged up to his armpits in shit, Coriolino has an air of self-gratification and pours an extra smattering on his head. On the shore the faithful clap joyfully, and he utters some salty witticisms when replying to the applause so as to demonstrate his basic gravitas, his worldliness (in particular his acquaintance with the ways of the beau monde), his practical approach to life. His followers redouble their applause. Upon the marsh of manure gently hang the branches of some diarrhoea of the spirit or other. From time to time, Coriolino stretches out his arm and, extracting some sludgy fruit, throws it to the applauding crowd. He then gets out to a stir of whispered admiration. Noble ladies accost him to lick off the excrement covering him; youngsters wish to copy him and dive into the brownish pulp. They are always laughing, laughing above all at those incompetents who still bathe in clear waters: the idea of having to splash around in odourless waters almost makes them faint, shrieking with laughter.

They lunch by candle light, a tureen full of suppli’: they would love to wear a farthingale and travel around in a carriage but since they are no longer to be found, they travel in Fiat 600’s dressed up as a lizard or a bedouin. Moreover, they follow Coriolino everywhere: gratified, he feigns to be interested in their artistic excrement with the air of one who throws a bone to a dog since he too is a musician; he tries his hand at writing plays, and designs a few quick sketches with a paintbrush inserted into his anus. Yet his great fame doesn’t depend so much on his own faeces but on the quantity of international dung which he manages to collect at his own Gathering of the Foul Ones. The elderly smeared in manure and directors from the sewers arrive to bathe from every antipode of the earth. 

The Island

Inspired by his reading of Robinson Crusoe, Gromibo decided to turn his flat into a desert island. Initially his wife Crabua didn’t object, but later, when one evening he returned from his job at the bank with the news that the removal men were coming to take away the furniture the next morning,  she was distraught and even started to cry. She, too, had read Robinson’s inspiring story and went to fetch a copy of the novel pointing out to her husband that in reality Robinson really had some items of furniture and sundry objects salvaged from the shipwreck. These included an inkpot, some weapons, cheeses, coils of lead piping, hammocks, a small cupboard, silver cutlery and, in short, more things than they owned while living in their apartment block. So husband and wife together came to a common agreement to draw up a list of items to salvage from the shipwreck. Drafting this list what was really shipwrecked was any common agreement. Crabua wanted to hold on to everything, in fact she even talked of making new purchases such as deckchairs, beach umbrellas, mosquito nets. Gromibo, on the contrary, wished to start from scratch, that is, with only a hammer and a kilogram of nails of varying sizes. Crabua also feared that the slow procession of her furniture downstairs would be accompanied by a rapid decline in her personal standing amongst the women of the neighbourhood, but Gromibo tried to explain to her that, as soon as they land on the island, such a thing as a neighbourhood would cease to exist by definition. Besides, he with his hammer and those trunks – those strong, bulky ones which people sometimes thoughtlessly leave out at night alongside the rubbish and which the rubbish collectors simply refuse to take away – will mean that she won’t lack anything. The expulsion of the furniture turned into a terribly distressing scene. Caruba grabbed on to the bedside tables as though they were her own sons and brothers; she threatened fainting fits from which she immediately recovered to throw herself on to the oven with all the pots and pans in her arms. She spat out feathers and tufts of wool in her patriotic attempt to defend with her teeth the mattresses and pillows. With the fridges first steps into exile she completely lost her mind for about a quarter of an hour. In spite of this she managed to save something  though not it should be said the respect of her neighbours which, more than any consideration about the natural isolation of the islands, resulted in her no longer leaving the house at least during the daytime. She now prefers to do her shopping between four and five in the morning in a small market open at night-time.

There then followed a period of absolute conjugal bliss for this shipwrecked couple. Upon hearing the first shrieks of the macaques soon to be drowned out by the screeches of the early morning parrots, Gromibo gets up from his fresh straw mattresses made from carbon paper, washes himself with some leftover lard and then merrily awakens his wife with a few cudgel blows and then leaves to go to the bank. Caruba has been renamed Friday and sleeps in the bathtub because of the cockroaches which have invaded the island. He is never one to return from work without some useful object or titbit gathered in the early morning from the trashcans along the way: a car hub cap, an exotic looking banana, a charming little animal to keep them company or keep them fed, potato peelings which they can sow, a theodolite with a single arm, even a dead sheep he found one evening after closing his account books. Friday does her best to keep his clothes clean and tidy, as a job in a bank entails but she goes around with any old rags even those gathered by her husband in the course of his forays to the surroundings of the small fort or in mountainous zones in outlying areas. For example, he may bring her a modern lampshade with a frieze of tanks for her to wear as a dress during the day and another with the ancient map of Dacia and Sarmatia as an evening dress as well as those wonderful combinations of doormats that the island women wear. Fairly often, Gromibo adds to his usual gifts a sack of bones or chicken heads which can be crushed with flint and then gnawed on along with the scraps of watermelon found under swarms of flies and birds of prey in the archipelago. In the evening under the mystical glow of endless advertising, Friday will light the sharp oil lamp and, in the dream-like light, will beckon to the delight of her husband with the paces of a Gregorian dance. After this they will sit on the floor lovingly wrapped in each others embraces by the last embers of the firebrick hearth and listen together  to the magnificent silence of the night interrupted only by the bloodcurdling screams coming from television sets, and from the measured howls of distant hyenas. But now and again, Gromibo will get up and, turning his trustful gaze towards the windowpane, misting over with the cold and veiled by the rain, he will murmur “oh, if only a ship would pass by…”

Liberation

Heir to varied and easy fortunes, a lover of sport and life in the open-air, Serten is nevertheless afflicted by annoying inhibitions, the sad legacy of the urbane type as well as a logical consequence of a flawed upbringing. To free himself from this, and lacking neither in means nor in willpower, the young man has placed himself trustingly in the hands of the best neurosurgeons. At first, the neurosurgeons advised him to go for the simplest operation, a series of electric shocks. However, Serten objected that one could only expect commonplace results from such a commonplace operation. Moreover, a colleague at university, after his third electric shock treatment, had been seen walking around with his tongue sticking out of his mouth and arms grazing the pavement. Even if his tongue has begun to return to its proper position recently, his family has long since despaired of ever returning him on the right track. Therefore, Serten opted for a lobotomy, a very fine operation invented in Portugal: a small hole has been made in his right temple and another in his left, then a thread was introduced through the hole, and the able surgeon cut the connection between his thalamus and his frontal lobes with two swift tears. This operation took place a few years ago: since then neurosurgical techniques have changed a lot and been perfected, and Serten, too, has changed and been made more perfect.

He is often in very high spirits and has become rather waggish. On the occasion of the recent solemn funeral of a palatine cardinal, he tailed the procession in his car with his umbrella open inside the car while wearing no trousers. Fortunately, the crowd, in its deep mourning, was unaware of this. The only embarassing moment came when Serten started to hurl some artichokes, a few dozen of them, in front of the monumental gates of the cemetery of the Beati Rapiti. He remembers perfectly well where he lives, and fully recognizes the members of his family, who are all rather perturbed by his perpetual displays of good humour and have all gradually, one by one, begun to move elsewhere. A brother of his tried to banish him using a salmon full of gunpowder which exploded at lunch. This attempt met with no success, however, because Serten has remained miraculously lucid, he knows how to count to 14, distinguishes the letters S & M and painting a certain sexual organ with Indian ink on a female cousins coat is certainly not enough to justify banishing a healthy, rich young man.

Given the success of the first operation, Serten has got other regions of his brain pricked, dissected and isolated. Several times, in order to reach a particularly intricate part of his cortex, they had to open the top of his skull using the typical horseshoe cut with a hand drill and saw, upsetting the parietal lobe. In this way he has managed to fully eliminate his sense of duty, shame, submission, remorse, fear, modesty, piety, insomnia and other such similar anomalies, all of them as rare as they are undesirable. Soft platinum protruberances stick out from his hair as trophies of a long battle for liberation. Most recently, ultrasonic techniques have opened the door to interesting new operations in the most secluded parts of the brain where the hypothalamus, hypophysis and putamen of the striated muscle is hidden. After the second application of the ultra-wave therapy, Serten has almost entirely lost his sense of direction as well as the few remaining social and sexual inhibitions he still had. Sometimes he finds himself in the fog in some meadow somewhere in the distant suburbs where  suddenly he, forgetful and happy, will begin to make love to a sheep or even (it’s all the same to him) a ram, stoic and thoughtful beasts. Finally exhausting himself, ragged, unkempt and dirty he runs into a local policeman on night duty and kissing him passionately on the mouth, or on his stomach, he asks him to take him home or, at least, to call him a taxi.

The Centaur

Scattered birds of prey are hovering in the steely light of the morning mainly to keep fit and stay warm as there is nothing left to prey on. The critters are in their lairs and the small birds fly under less severe skies. Oligor appears on the crest of the hill with his grey sheepskin busby. He wears a large jumper over his vest and a quilted jacket on top of his jumper. The lower part of his body is naked and the wind passes through his legs, or to be more precise his paws, and ruffles his tail feathers. His figure vaguely evokes ancient friezes when seen against the background of the hills. Oligor looks around him in that cold light and descends to the valley down the steep, stony paths with loud crashing footsteps . His dual nature of herbivore and carnivore detests this season:  in these parts, from November to January, one doesn’t find anything else to eat but chestnuts and apples and a diet consisting only of apples ends up inducing a kind of dysentery accompanied by hallucinations. As a desperate last resort he could try to eat the leaves off the trees but then almost all the perennials have bitter leaves.

A centaur is very much exposed to the cold. In other winters he tried to wear a cape when out for a stroll but his belly remained uncovered, that is either his stomach or his chest, because it is not clear where one begins and the other ends. His back is more adaptable to open-air life- it can stay under the rain all day without any inconvenience; but it is his front which suffers. Unable to button-up his jacket all the way down he tried to slip in a type of skirt made of Tartan wool under his large jumper, but he simply felt ridiculous with that type of apron on- it did not feel very masculine, so he had to take it off again. It’s not as though he frequents other centaurs- it is not a very sociable race and besides centaurs are more or less extinct. Yet for Olgar decorum is a value all of its own and a centaur with an apron is simply indecorous. Much more becoming would be a nice coypu cloak whose length reaches his tail, but this would not resolve the problem of the lower part of his chest, not to mention the disagreeable draught that forms behind in the cavern of his back. To tell the truth Oligor has never seen another centaur so he does not know how they are dressed during the winter. He hastily gathers the final shrivelled apples from the bare branches and returns to his stable.

In the stable he has everything he needs to paint: he is preparing for an exhibition. He has abandoned abstract art and is now dedicating himself to still lifes of a revealingly dream-like character. Since he is always dreaming of food to eat, his still lifes more often than not represent large stacks of hay and barley, or smoked herrings which are a particular favourite, or small sugar cubes and other similar delicacies. He is presently completing a large allegorical picture which occupies almost half of the stable. It represents a large plane fodder-trough lined with fir, decorated on the exterior with large silver coins and with a pyramid of cream bignes generously covered with honey and heaps of medical herbs placed all around. Above the fodder-trough flutters a heraldic or mythic beast with the body of a predator and the head of a reptile; behind one of the doors a horse ventures in a rather threatening manner. The horses of Oligor have something monstrous about them.