HOMO LUDENS

Among the many childhood memories that race like hungry minnows through the tortured consciousness of Currado Malaspina are the commingling images of pain and play.

The medicinal vegetable juices with their punitive tastes and pale unappetizing hues that were forced upon him by his elderly, spinster great-aunt have left Currado, to this day, with an irrational aversion to turnips and chard. And yet together with that vaguely repugnant reminiscence another image trots to the surface that is neither nauseating nor unpleasant and that is the vivid recollection of the very same tante Odette's beautiful young nurse who lived with the family intermittently as the terminally unmarried octogenarian aged into near complete invalidity.

Another equally conspicuous contrast is that of the crowded urban playgrounds with their rusted Italian slides and antiquated swings where Currado received his first catechism in the many essential skills of inner city survival.

It was there where the local prepubescent punks were tutored by their not-so-elders in the arts of smoking, stealing and something that resembled fucking but was not nearly as refined. These same swings but in modified forms began to claim an infelicitous residence in the Malaspina summer estate in Brue-Auriac. Like squatters these swings slowly took over the long abandoned étable des vaches until the place looked like a poorly planned daycare center.

The children, on pain of severe corporal punishment, were forbidden entry into what looked to them like an earthly paradise. The former barn was the exclusive domain of Malaspina's father Sordello and if a child suffered the misfortune of getting caught meandering around, or worse, actually swaying blissfully upon the apparatuses, a beating "à l'Afrique du nord" would soon follow.

The pieces began to fit together only many years later when the infamous erotic sketchbook was discovered. 

As my readers know, Sordello Malaspina was a part-time scribbler and a full-time philanderer and like a punctilious scrivener he would record his many conquests with small awkward and detailed drawings.

It's nice to know that at least somebody got to play!