EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH

The only one of Currado Malaspina's five adolescent children to rebel against him was his fourth wife Simone. 

My good friend Currado is an elusive target for teenage insurrection. An apostate by nature and as forgiving as a Christ, his family cherished his eccentric neutrality. Even when his kids toyed with their minor expressions of social insubordination it was hard to press against their imperturbable papa.

Except of course Simone. Batting clean-up in his pantheon of committed female companions, Simone was young enough to be Currado's niece yet old enough to know better. 

At first she was attracted to his genius. She saw in him an older man steeped in the hopelessness of unprofitable scholarship. She admired his capacity for insolence in the face of sanctimony. She loved how he greeted the calculated reverence of his faithless admirers with the canny percipience of a lama. She even adored his wily sense of satire, especially when the farce was directed toward her intimate circle of coquettish friends. 

But soon her high regard turned like an old camembert into a quiet repugnance. 

Simone had an unremarkable childhood. The second among four siblings, she was what the French call un loup sans baiser - or what we might describe as an "an unlicked cub." As is often the case with people given short shrift in the birth order she had an insatiable demand for validation. To visit Currado during the Simone years was to witness a constant chorus of c'est géniale ma chérie! and formidable ma poulette! or, (I kid you not, I actually heard this), tu es un cadeau de Dieu à la planète Terre et il n'y a pas d'égal à ta beauté et intelligence! If an hourly paean was not forthcoming, Simone would withdraw into a hushed and despairing pout.

She started reading books with titles like Les pouvoirs de la confiance en soi and Pensée positive: Comment stopper les pensées négatives et réduire le stress.

What she found was a blueprint for everything Currado was not. These books presented templates for effective, passionless living, void of irony yet full of plainspoken benchmarks for the complete avoidance of dissonance and conflict.

Everything was always laid out in clear, bold-faced bullet points. Apposite excerpts from the roster of inoffensive sages were typically scattered throughout the text hoping to lend a patina of cerebral legitimacy to the flavorless stew.

The one thing more obnoxious than a distressed teenager quoting Gandhi is a distressed middle-aged woman doing the same.

Currado and Simone didn't really grow apart. They more or less imploded under the extreme pressure of propinquitous intellectual torpor. The more intensely Currado engaged in the ambiguities of art the more 
Simone retreated into the anodyne world of self-improvement.

A serial monogamist, the ripe Malaspina is now actively auditioning applicants for wife number five.

By all accounts, it seems like he's enjoying the process.