Early in his life, things started going wrong for our beloved Charles. If I was a sober and decent man, at least slightly concerned about moral or ethics, I would probably say that sin was surrounding him even before his bursting into life. What I mean is that he was conceived under the sign of a potential familiar mess: the mother, sexually unattended by the monkey she has as a husband, took his monkey in law as a promoter of her pregnancy. At his birth, nobody could allege deviation from the expected simian parameters, but all the family knows what the point was about.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not exactly a sober man. And, if you ask me, I really don’t care about moral or ethics and I know it would be a complete nonsense, to talk about moral or ethics on the subject of our beloved Charles. And moral or ethics doesn’t matter at all with what really ruined his life.
We met for the first time at school at the age of twelve and we immediately set up a limited society, playing hookey and teaching each other to smoke. Firstly, we only burnt nice rich flavoured Marlboro blend –blue ticket, chartered straight from the USA, bought under the table in a road bar of ill repute-, then, mixing it up with some sort of herbs Bob was singing about in those days.
Our beloved Charles liked to burn other things, too. But I wasn’t there in the back yard, the night things went wrong. He set on stage a complete scenography of an inquisitorial Act of Faith, where the main role should be played by the neighbour’s cat -a big old black monster we hated discreetly-, sentenced to burn at the stake because its fanatical and relapse behaviour against the rosebushes. Our beloved Charles lost entirely both hope and identity in a lightning instant, that day, when the petrol can blew up and rubbed out his face.
But, who needs hope, to live an unhappy life? And a new identity grew up from the infertile land of his childhood early lost; forgotten obstinately since then. From the cave of affliction emerged a man without debt or obligation, no rules to be respected, no excuses to ask for. Being his borrowed flesh so tender and defenceless in front of people’s sight, he had to get used to nocturnality. Premeditation just came after, the aggravating buddy of furtive gambits of thieves and dealers.
Thieves and dealers don’t need moral or ethics coming around in business. They need facts. Take it for granted, he was the best in his own; smart enough to avoid bad karma and sneaks, swift and clever and cautious like a nocturnal bird and, in addition, of ill omen. As an analytical pusher, he never trusted anybody. Relationships and old friendships being progressively deconstructed, eventually ballast just to be dump overboard.
Better to be alone than in company.
However, I’m pretty sure he enjoyed the family of his own. At least, in is own way. He stayed at home for ever, living in a small but private room at the basements, like a spoiled host at Fawlty Towers. Our beloved Charles going upstairs from time to time, joining the family –his elder brother, the two monkeys and his adored mother- on Christmas Eve or on the occasion of his uncle-father’s retirement.
So, I believe there is no reason to doubt about his absolute desolation, the soul’s devastation he had to face up when, in a few months period of time, he lost his elder brother, his father-father and his adored mother. In this exact order. The last, his mother, killed by a heart attack that proved to be a manufacturing defect which affected just the fattest in the family. When she died, undertakers extracted the lady through the very same window they had broken four months before for her son: thirty-five years old, two hundred and twenty-four kilograms.
Better to be alone than in company?
I really don’t want to know what kind of drunken goodness of love, what malicious and devious Cupid could scheme for that overcoming of passion, that discordant union they stuck together: the macrobiotic woman, young, fit and healthy, feminist, graduated on Philosophy, radical left-wing and (for men’s shake) threatening self-conscious, selling vitamins and tofu hamburgers for a post-modern franchise… sentimentally involved with the going down -slow but imperturbable- junkie.
You know, love doesn’t need moral or ethics coming around, neither does sense. By the way, the question is where they met for the first time? Not at Sunday mass, of course, where any of them very often concurred. I can imagine for them another sort of no man’s streets’ meetings; furtive connections on the border between parallel worlds; osmotic love at first sight.
I promise, I don’t want to appear ironical or disdainful with their story of true love. Whether I liked it or not, I must admit the evidence. At least for a while, they had the seventh heaven at their fingertips, which is more than the best we can hope for the majority of us, despite our reluctance to admit it. Moreover, I think they were happy in their own way: “the toxic man and the macrobiotic girl”, like the cover of Marvel comics from the seventies.
Am I my brother’s keeper?[1] According to the supposed general and wide consensus, of course I’m not. So, how I would dare to judge them?
I prefer pretending to believe in karma or in the ridiculous theory about general counterbalance or in any other silly explanation of what should be kept unpronounced.
Well, I was there in the back yard, the night we celebrate his closely approaching wedding. Stag night of jerks; a late party of the derelict and shipwrecked. You Honour, being both judge and jury, I decline to testify against the members of a crepuscular version of the last supper, listening to Neil Young’s songs, smoking home-grown skunk and putting the blame on each other. But nobody could imagine that the line of life was so thin in his hands. Well, late at night when all people were gone, things went fucked up; because let me tell you that it sent a chill up and down my spine, when I picked up the telephone and heard that he’d died out on the mainline.
To our beloved Charles. Tonight’s the night.
[1] Genesis 4:9 (King James Version). 9And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother?, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?
