Il Madre
I went down to West End this evening to have a coffee with someone and it was all going well. There were the usual sorts of West End suspects cruising around, and one of them decided that it was my night to hear his story.
He looked a little like a bushranger, he had the beard, he had the long hair, he was a wild kind of guy. Black jeans, wine coloured shirt, black vest. A couple of necklaces, and at least 12 rings. He was walking slowly, stumbling occasionally, propping himself up on the wall intermittently. He did not look like a very happy man. He asked me for something, which I gave to him and then proceeded to tell us what's been going on.
He said that he was a Gypsy and had come from Melbourne. His mission here was to take his mother's body back home. She was in a coma in hospital and only had a few days left to live. He was the sole child able to do something about it. One sister committed suicide two years ago. His brother was in jail. His other sister the mother had put a curse on, she was no longer part of the family. He, himself, had only recently been released from jail, and it was now his job to look after her mother and her body when she left this life. He had tried to visit her today, but was thrown out of the jail because he was drunk. He's an alcoholic and drinks from the moment he wakes up til the moment he falls down. He can't read or write, and doesn't know where he can turn for some help with his impending duties. He is a very lost individual and doesn't know what he can do.
He was saying how the Gypsies had originally come from India, the Punjab region. They had made there way across Asia and Europe, eventually roaming the countryside of Italy, Spain and places like that. I don't know how his family ended up in Australia, but apparently his father was part Aboriginal and a Vietnam veteran. His father blew the back of his head off with a double barrelled shotgun ten years ago. He asked me if I had a knife so that he could stab himself in the neck right there and then. He didn't know what he could do and he doesn't think that he's going to be able to cope. His mother called him a motherfucking cunt and a hard bastard. To prove this he hit himself in the head repeatedly. Eventually one of his rings opened up a cut in his forehead. Everytime he mentioned Pentridge prison and cancer he spat over his shoulder. Occasionally he would start speaking in a foreign tongue, repeating il Madre, il Madre. He would then start to cry.
I didn't know what to do. The only advice I could offer was that he do what his mother would want. That he should talk to the people at the hospital, they would know what to do. I told him that he needed to be sober. I told him that this was going to be a very difficult time but that he would have to do the right thing. I don't think I was any help, and I don't think that I could do any more, although I wish that I could have.
posted by Robb @ 10:16 PM
2 Comments:
You should have told him we were actually in the year 2168. His purpose in life at this point was not to save his mother, who is actually a dolichocephaloid replicant, but to chronicle every permutation of sidewalk concrete in the entire world.
The truth about his mother would be revealed once he had performed this task. His father is not dead and his mother is not in a coma; they are government plants to distract him from the truth about Jesus being a Kashmiri Gipsy and carrying the bloodline of the Elders who built the Earth's core. Of course, he must be aware that the Earth's core is actually the medulla oblongata of Xenu and not a control room where Swiss scientists watch the experiment known as 'Human Life'.
What he thought was his father 'blowing his head off' was actually a ritual to extract the Romagian lifeform that exists more as a metaphysical essence than a typical physical entity. The Romagian started a small plastics factory in Virginia. He has two small children, Rhett and Martha, and has almost paid off his mortgage.
Once your Gypsy friend had chronicled every sidewalk in the world the truth about this 'Il Madre' would be revealed. He would have to trek to the jungles of Panama, taking with him a photo of James Cagney and a hefty supply of those glutinous "Space Bars" that Astronauts eat. You could tell him they sell the Space Bars at Australian Geographic shops. Telling him that might make his job easier.
Once in Panama he would have to confront an onslaught of screams from the souls of Gypsy past. He would have to be strong; the screams, along with the apparaitions of those he had wronged, are merely a distraction. Yodeling a rendition of Bob Dylan's 'Mr Tambourine Man', he would climb the dilapidated steps of a strangely Chthulu looking temple.
Inside he would find the secret to the curse his mother placed. The truth about the curse may be something he could not prepare for, but discovery of it by him, and only him, is the answer to everything. The fate of the world, nay, the cosmos, is in his hands.
Yeah, you should have told him that.
Maybe I should have had you there to tell it to him! I don't think that I can pronounce words like dolichocephaloid. I wonder what a yodelled version of Mr Tambourine Man would sound like? I heard some techno remix of the Ace Of Spades this morning. It wasn't good.
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