RATI

My dear friend Currado Malaspina is a cheerless recluse with a jaundiced perspective on everything but food. Throw him a plate of Spanish gooseneck barnacles in aioli or an andouillette au Chablis and his grimace grows mushy and moist. 

But in matters excluding the palate Malaspina remains the quiet Quaker gently consigning his underworked senses somewhere between annoying and superfluous.

"Man is a rational creature," he would to say while drowning a wedge of Beaufort d'ete in a slow current of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, "the soul is a fairy tale and the heart a pitiable cliché."

I used to hate him for this until I realized that everyone who really cared about him looked past his cold disinterest as if it were an unfortunate birthmark. They all said he was licking some vague emotional wound and like all Frenchmen he would eventually find himself reanimated by the unreliable thrills of amour-fou.

I admit I was looking forward to that moment if only for its entertainment value. Nothing is more amusing than a slowly derailing train wreck when your best friend is riding shotgun with the conductor.

My spirits lifted when he told me he had finally met his Beatrice.

Thirty-four years his junior (about the same age as his step-daughter Anise), by all accounts Malaspina's new muse is a solipsistic slut who trolls the Parisian intelligentsia swapping her swains for the grizzled graybeards with international reputations. 

For her, Currado was a ripe mango dangling from the lowest bough.

Au secour!

While others mourn I watch with amusement for crazy-love is the one hallucination I can fully endorse.

What other emotion gives the intoxicant a reason to get both in and out of bed?

FUGUE

Countervailing the cultural currents of French laïcité my good friend Currado Malaspina was raised in rural Roussillon as a Manichean catholic. Taught from a very young age to abide by at least six or seven of the existing ten commandments, Malaspina's early years were defined by selective prohibitions and arbitrary taboos. One needn't therefore be a post-Freudian structuralist to appreciate the provenance of Currado's subsequent libertinage. 

To be schooled by parish deacons, cruel provincial priests and frosty eczemed nuns can prove oddly salubrious to the nascent libido. As has been pointed out by people much smarter than myself, nothing whets the thirst like drought (rien aiguise la soif comme la sécheresse).

His education was anything but sentimental but with his solid grounding in exegetical Latin, Currado became expert in grafting complex meaning to utter nonsense.

Persuading Monique Carcuela to consign herself as innocent muse was easy enough, especially when the enterprise was pitched in the fashionable artist argot of the time. Dragging her through the smutty cesspool of Malaspina's twisted choreography took a good deal more finesse.

Citing Emerson, Locke, Donne and Ram Dass was anything if not a stretch but ultimately what sealed the dirty deal was when Currado promised the ambitious Carcuela that an introduction to his third cousin, Henri-Georges Clouzot, was imminent. That he wasn't even remotely related to the famous filmmaker never occurred to Currado as much of an obstacle.

And so together, with quill in hand, Carcuela and Currado went on to reenact in excruciating detail each charlie-horsed leaf of Vatsyayana's vaunted Kama Sutra.

... while adding a few charming variations of their own.