| Lucci and Remedios |
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My name is Lucci, Yes, I go by my last name only. My friends joke it sounds so much like louche; you may be vaguely aware that louche is from the French louche, "shady, suspicious," from Old French losche, "squint-eyed," from Latin luscus, "one-eyed." The name names me well as you will soon see, for I only respect stray facts, manic theories, and well-told lies.
I am both conjuror and illusionist: a woman of the world who has fallen down an elevator shaft into a pool of mermaids. My companion. A handsome one he is. We travel, surrounded by warm, bright and often humorous incident, the textures of a life well lived, on which we doodle and jest, nibble at the edges of our own desires. I speak, of course, for I know nothing if not that observation matters and I have no problem letting others know what I think. Words I covet: deshabille, disorderly, bombshell, tidy, fit, eunuch, all the serious “s” words like solemn, sullen, somatic, slumbering. The lively rhythmic variety of Italian curse words: che cazzo! Che schema! La bruta! una bella fica. And why not? I grew up under the watchful eye of Tranquilina Lucci, my father’s mother’s mother, who by the time that I knew her, had lived so long she’d lost track of her age. Lusty and combative, a former vaudeville stripper turned seamstress, the fascination she felt for accordion players with their traveler’s serenades became her way of speaking, lines of non-sequiturs softened through song. At night we dream of numbers, lots cast through chance calculation. Seven returns twice but tells no one of its secret. The days I remember best are those spent in the dark together, stowed away in cabinets beneath the bathroom sink, under beds, behind doors, in closets, to conspiratorially huddle against space and light, sharing stories and avoiding the teeming masses of children milling about. I imagined that the hole in the closet ceiling led all the way to the roof, and pictured it as an orifice of adventure out of which my future would eventually be birthed. Remedios, the resident squirrel cub, most certainly put this hole to the best possible use, in performing broken magic tricks that never failed to delight. At the stroke of one, five, nine, came an announcement: “I feel a song coming on!” which signaled our escape to reason. Scamper then from inside the sink/closet/bed and head to my room, a smallish space with a large picture window, throw the shutters wide, and sing our lungs out, accompanied most days by one of twenty-one records kept for such occasions. August nights she ventured out, to perform private solos under the ruined lights of the ancient theatre across the street, sultry burlesque routines combined with a bit of soft shoe. She acted in my own private fictions dancing in concert with the stories I told myself about a squirrel, in a color-encrusted suit, swimming to the moon. Made of the thread of hundreds of unraveled kerchiefs stolen from the trunks of traveling troubadours, a cacophony of memory and texture, color and story, glitter, wool, and light. There was a sense that nothing after these impromptu performances would ever be the same. We learned to believe in the magic power of shimmer and string for with a needle and a few clever tricks it could be used to repair the damage—of small spaces, large families, of lost and forgotten children. With it we played cat’s cradle in spring; in winter it was knit into conical caps with colored flaps to keep our ears warm. In summer the hats were refashioned into breezy hammocks hung in the narrow space between buildings. In it we swung, side-by-side, escape artists on a magic carpet ride to nowhere. String was our claim to forgiveness. Now. My own temporality suspended, indefinite, my sense of future concatenated, flattened, and folded. It is the cliché of my age that hurts me most. If the preceding posts are simply a compendium of mass misconceptions—a confusing jumble of mythology, gossip, jest and hoax—what, you must ask yourself, can you believe? |
