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t h e n e o - c o m i n t e r n e l e c t r o n i c m a g z i n e
I n s t a l l m e n t N u m b e r 1 6 0
We Are the New International
June 29th, 2001
Editor: BMC
Writers:
Margarina Cataclysma
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;P Featured in this installment .b
$ $
$ Mantante Gabrielle - Margarina Cataclysma $
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EDITOR'S NOTE
(please do not read the following)
1) Lovely day it is today, June 29th.
2) It is a lovely day for all sorts of things.
3) Air conditioning, reading, writing, movie.
4) Camping, swimming, playing tennis, walking on a nature trail.
5) Why not do all of it?
7) Sorry, that wasn't a good enough answer.
8) Start with this, end with everything.
9) Time for fun with Margarina Cataclysma.
10) Then time for nature, grass, air, trees, etc.
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;P MANTANTE GABRIELLE .b
`q by Margarina Cataclysma p'
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Once upon a time there was a maiden aunt. She often sat on the porch,
looking out at the garden. And this is her story.
Well, to be perfectly honest, I don't know her story. Her name was
Gabrielle Marie, though, and she was born in 1908. Her parents were farmers
of the French-Canadian variety, and they moved west from Quebec (the old
country) to Saskatchewan sometime before Gabrielle Marie was born.
Gabrielle was the first born of a large Catholic brood. When I knew her (I
don't recall the circumstances of our first meeting but I think it's safe to
assume that it was at some sort of family gathering shortly after my birth),
she was the shortest and most mustachioed of the brood. She also had some
interesting sprouts on her chin, which I do believe disproves my mother's
claim to native ancestry.
The brothers of this family had followed in their parents' footsteps,
continuing to farm the family land. The sisters did all sorts of other
things, but none of them farmed. Several of them entered convents and
learned to make fudge, and footstools out of old tomato juice cans. These
auntly nuns were very sweet and kind. They were not the forbidding,
omen-burdened, repressed nuns of popular lore. My personal favorite
great-aunt-nun was Rolanda. When I was a child, she would let me pull the
wig off her head and wear the grey thing around the house. She was also the
mistress of fudge. I believe that it is she who should shoulder the blame
for my rotten teeth, and not Christ who died for our sins although it is he
who created (by proxy or not I don't care) the acid excreting bacteria that
digested my poor enamel.
Anyhow, enough about my teeth. Our dear Soeurs Rolanda, Marguerite, Marie
Rose, Isabel, Louisanne, and Helene lived in relative communal bliss in
their respective convents, cloisters, and suburban retreats. I know nothing
of the orders to which they belonged, for they were not the sorts of
religious characters who feel it imperative to witness to each and every
child of the Lord they come across. However I am sure they went to mass
every morning. When I visited their homes (accompanied by my grandmother) I
snooped around while they played cards and talked. In every house, in a
back room that would normally be a bedroom, there would be a shrine. These
prayer rooms were pretty much uniform in design. Against the far wall there
would be a short, cloth-covered table with candles and a statue of the
Virgin Mary and a cross nailed to the wall above it, and a smaller cross at
Mary's feet. There would be a thick carpet on the floor, and drawn blinds
over the windows. I was discouraged from playing in these rooms. Perhaps
there was some requirement to be initiated into the particular sect before
one could make prayers there, or maybe they figured that I had nothing to
pray about anyway. I didn't ask.
The sisters were all teachers, some of them were retired ("superannuated" in
teacherly lingo), some of them were semi-retired, teaching only prodigies on
Saturdays, and some of them directed small and grandiose theatrical
productions in the local theaters for the edification (read: fun and
entertainment) of the troupe and local citizenry. All in all, they were a
good bunch of great aunts. I imagine them growing up in a big crowded
household, without a t.v. of course, spending most of their time sewing,
chasing cows, making pork sausages, gutting chickens, and making lots of
noise. I can't imagine any of these good sisters in the throes of religious
rapture. Not that I doubt their commitments to their beliefs in God, but I
think that the whole nun thing was a career decision akin to a girl in our
time deciding to be a whatever it is that girls in our time decide they want
to be.
Not so with Gabrielle Marie. She was a rapture waiting to happen. I have
already told you that when she was a little old lady (in my lifetime) she
was short and grizzled. Now that is just appearance, and as such is
trivial. Gabrielle Marie did not become a nun. She and my grandmother were
the only girls of that family not to do so. My grandmother did not become a
nun because she fell in love with a randy young stud and they got married
and had kids, which preempted marriage to Christ. Matante Gabrielle, on the
other hand, was short and doughty and probably not that attractive to men.
When we were kids, we assumed that this was why she was an old spinster. We
mocked her a little. We didn't know any better. She was actually eminently
mockable, she seemed to set herself up for our jokes. Our favorite thing to
make fun of was the way she said everything twice. In the movie Goodfellas
the narrator introduces a tertiary character, Jimmy Two-Times, and then
Jimmy Two-Times says something twice. That is probably the funniest thing
in that entire sordid movie, and it is exactly what Matante Gabrielle did
with each and every phrase that came out of her mouth.
My grandmother knew that we made fun of her older sister Matante Two-Times,
and she'd scold us for it. My grandmother told me the story of Gabrielle
Marie. Apparently Matante Gabrielle was quite a beauty in the bloom of her
youth. She was really smart and she liked to read all of the time. So my
great-grandfather and great-grandmother put aside some money, and when she
was old enough to leave home, thirteen or so, they sent Gabrielle Marie off
to the convent in St. Louis to get educated.
But this didn't work out quite according to plan. It turned out that
Matante Gabrielle's rapture was epileptic in nature, and so the not-so-good
sisters of that convent turned her out onto the wild streets of that prairie
hamlet. Actually I just made that up, what I suppose really happened was
her father fired up the Ford and drove the sixty odd miles to pick her up
and bring her back to the farm.
Imagine the despair. Here you are, a young woman dreaming of completion and
humble happiness in the service of God, and God sees fit to reject you.
Imagine that. It sucks badly enough to be rejected by a mortal man -
imagine being rejected by a deity. I'm still trying to get over the brief
torrid romances of last summer. I can't begin to understand what it would
be like to get over God. But Matante Gabrielle did it! My grandmother says
that of course Gabrielle Marie was heart broken, but they prayed to God and
prayed to God some more and eventually someone made a drug that kept
epileptic seizures in check.
But that was several years later. I looked it up, the drug is called
phenobarbitone (commercially known as Luminal) and it was not available for
public use in the United States until at least 1918, and I'm adding on at
least fifteen years to that because this is rural Saskatchewan we're talking
about. In those days, our pleasant province was not known for its edge on
biotechnology. So I'm supposing that Matante Gabrielle would have been
perhaps in her mid- to late-twenties when she got medicated. Let me give
you a little history of epilepsy medication: first were bromides, which were
purported to inhibit masturbation. Masturbation was considered by many fine
physicians to be a leading cause of epilepsy. Nowadays we mostly use
bromides as fuel additives and dye fixatives. Then someone cooked up
barbiturates, and everyone had quiet fun with those for a while. Someone
fiddled around and added some little reactive group to a simple barbiturate,
creating phenobarbitone. It was first used as a sedative for people who
were having panic attacks and the like, and then someone introduced it into
epileptic therapy. And the rest is history. (I don't feel like reading
about the more recent drugs developed to treat epilepsy, if you want to know
about them you will have to fire up your browser or go to the library.)
I stole the following from a website that shall remain domainless because I
neglected to bookmark it: A group of Chinese physicians from about 1770-221
B.C. composed "The Yellow Emperor's Classic Of Internal Medicine" or "Huang
De Nei Ching". It contains the first known document of epilepsy. The
description of fits is limited to generalized seizures and epilepsy was not
well distinguished from mental disorders such as psychosis and mania.
Attacks were classified according to which animal made a sound similar to
the cry of the epileptic during seizure. Thus, there were horse, pig, cow,
goat and chicken class seizures. Treatment relied on a variety of herbs to
balance the yin and yang forces. Health resulted from a condensation of
cosmic forces. Status epilepticus was described much later by Shen Jin Ao
in 1776 A.D.
Now I don't know if any of you have any friends or acquaintances who are
epileptic. I never saw Matante Gabrielle in a seizure. But in elementary
school there was a boy in my class who was (is) epileptic. His name was
(is) Hank. Hank was a big boy with slow speech and big fists that couldn't
quite hold pencils properly. A very nice guy, good to have on your team if
you were playing baseball because he could really hit a ball. Also, he was
a good block and tackler at football. But I didn't play sports so I didn't
know Hank in that way.
What is most memorable about Hank is his seizures. First he'd grunt. I
would classify his grunts as most similar to those of a pig. Then he'd
stand up from his slightly too small desk and rub his fingers against the
palms of their respective hands. And whatever teacher we had that year
would stop mid-yak and look slightly nervously at him. Then Hank would sit
down again. Then he'd stand up again. Then he'd walk around the room sort
of aimlessly bumping into things. He'd sit down at his desk again if it
happened to be nearby when he felt like sitting. Once he sat on my friend
Lisa. Somewhere in here the teacher would cautiously resume teaching; we had
discovered, through much trial and error and waiting around for Hank to be
finished with his seizure, that he liked to take his sweet old time about
seizuring. Eventually, after much wandering around, sitting down and
standing up again and moaning and generally making everyone nervous, Hank
would flop down onto the floor and convulse. Someone (usually my older
brother who had failed a couple of grades and so was braver than the rest of
us) would hold his head. Then suddenly out of nowhere Hank's eyes would
refocus, his mammoth trembling hand would wipe a gob of spit off of his
face, and he'd ask politely to go to the washroom.
So that is what I know about epilepsy. What did my dear Matante Gabrielle
Marie do all those years between being put out of the convent and becoming
medicated? And what did she do with herself when she was finally able to
control the seizures? I think it's safest to assume that she did not spend
most of her time masturbating. In her later years she lived with my
grandmother, and the two of them kept house together. My grandfather (the
aforementioned randy young stud) had split the scene some decades since, and
so the two sisters lived a quiet life of cribbage and church going and
reading and stuff.
A funny thing happened. My grandmother spent several years writing a
history of the diocese. Matante Gabrielle was her assistant. (If you ever
get your hands on a copy of that tome, you can find photos of the various
nuns that I mentioned earlier, and one of my grandmother when she was
teaching in Cochin, and one of Matante Gabrielle in a photo of the convent
at St. Louis.) Matante Gabrielle had a really good memory and so whenever
my slightly scatterbrained grandmother couldn't quite put her finger on
something, Matante Gabrielle would steer her research in the right
direction. In the course of writing this book, my grandmother interviewed
about a thousand people and Matante Gabrielle would bake some cookies (she
was always a little heavy on the baking powder, I don't think she realized
the difference between 1 Tbsp. and 1 tsp.)(they were always nice light
cookies though, even if they tasted funny) and they'd have tea with their
interviewee of the day.
So anyway, cookies aside, the funny thing is that one of the interviewees
decided that a nice gentle cookie-baking lady could use a gentleman
companion. And Matante Gabrielle was tremendously excited about this. A
Gentleman Companion! That could make one's eighties so much more fun and
stimulating! So a date was set, and the two sisters decided that the best
way to have a respectable yet super-fun time would be to play bridge with
this potential suitor. Bridge apparently is a difficult game to get the
hang of, so if the prospective gentleman friend was a little simple they
would know it tout suite. So the appointed evening rolled around and those
of us who regularly dropped in at that house were told with no mincing of
words to stay away. My grandmother's bridge partner arrived and they sat
around visiting, sipping sherry most probably. Then a knock on the door!
They rushed to answer it and oh Mon Dieu it was Father Blahblahblah from the
remote parish of St. Blah. So much for romance. I think the ending that my
grandmother put on this story was, "Oh well, at least he played bridge." I
think they may have interviewed the good priest for the book.
Well back to the point. After Gabrielle Marie was kicked out of the
convent, her father came to pick her up in the Ford and they went back to
the farm. She spent many years taking care of the household, baking bread
and such, and one by one she watched her little sisters grow up and enter
the service of the church. I think she was happy for them.
I would like to point out, for the sake of my good great-aunt's reputation,
that she carefully and diligently preserved her virginity during these
interim years. I have never heard any reports to the contrary so it must be
true. When she finally got her hands on the phenobarbitone, her seizures
were sufficiently repressed and she was able to return to the convent at St.
Louis. But she didn't return as a novice, she got a job working in the
kitchen! She worked there for many years. Why? I will never know, because
she died when I was a teenager and I never bothered to ask.
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___________________________________________________
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|___________________________________________________|
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| Questions? Comments? Submissions? |
| Email BMC at: thebmc@home.com |
|___________________________________________________|
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Copyright 2001 by The Neo-Comintern #160-06/29/01
All content is property of The Neo-Comintern.
You may redistribute this document, although no fee can be charged and the
content must not be altered or modified in any way. Unauthorized use of any
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