INNOCENT FRAUD

When I asked my good friend Currado Malaspina how his kid sister Beatrice was doing his eyes began to swell like a sponge.

"I've gone from bad to worse to total resignation and all I ever think about is the tragic loss of lovely promise."

I'm not accustomed to Currado being so sincere and emotional but the subject of his sister had hit a nerve.

Currado was 14 when his father Sordello disappeared for good. His mother was what we would call today an ICD-10 294.11 but in those days was referred to simply as "batshit crazy" (fou comme le merde d'une chauve souris). Together with hustling tourists for chump change, learning to draw and seducing immigrant shop-girls at le Printemps, Currado spent his adolescence raising his younger sister under a stern, over-protective umbrella.

"I imagine her now as this beautiful, angelic and brilliant woman, prone, face down in a pile of  debris and all I can think of is that someone is throwing away a perfectly good human."

"A crumpled, trampled 100 euro bill can still buy some wine and paté but once you rip it in half, it becomes worthless. That's my sister - a soul  seized by good people with bad ideas. 

"It's sometimes known as 'la corruption de bonnes intentions' (noble cause corruption), when people with the most forthright motives do unconscionable things."

I have to confess that I had no idea what the heck Malaspina was talking about. Then, a few days later I ran into Beatrice by the canal de l'Ourcq. She smelled like a punchbowl of patchouli and printing ink and was handing out flyers announcing a soirée spéciale at some office complex in the 19th.

Beatrice had apparently become an itinerant pitchwoman for Point de Repère©, the recently rehabilitated pop-psyche ponzi patter-fest that has transformed perfectly maladjusted bohemians into minor corporate shills.

They mean well ... they really do.

Life is brutal and if your mother was mad and your dad was a cad and your brother was the country's most famous and most puerile artist/pornographer you too would need a psychological amphetamine.

So Beatrice drank the pastis (i.e. Kool-Aid). 

Through a fixed and freaky stare she asks passersby if they are ready to "créer la possibilité pour une percée incroyable" and then proceeds to press a glossy prospectus into their unreceptive palm.

Yes ... she's that woman!

But please, if you see her, don't hasten your step or cross to the other side of the street. All she's doing is looking for love. 

Have compassion.

Even glassy-eyed evangelists deserve our pity.