a new approach :
a new story

our story begins life in Venezia. On the edge of a canal, a little off the main waterways. As we walk along, arm in arm, a little tipsy and a lot happy from our evening just spent in our favourite bistro/café, we turn a corner to make our way homeward and are brought up short by what greets us......

Travel this journey with us as we explore a new paradigm in story development • words, pictures and sensations
- all considered and relevant

A • N • T • O • N • I • O

* the following is a first 'walk-through' of the storyline •

it has gone through and continues to go through,

numerous changes, adjustments as we,

in our research, build the plotLines

- the following passages are examples of just

such ongoing experimentation •

___________________________________________________________________________

in the beginning it should have been okay

that’s what the counsellor told her, anyway

in the beginning, there were probably warning signs

problem is, she was not equipped to recognize them

and so, in the beginning, from the beginning, she was doomed

knowing that now did not help her now.

knowing that then, wouldn’t have helped her avoid the inevitable in any event.

Least that was what the team leader told her.

He was, she told her, just ‘that kind of guy’- and she shouldn’t fault herself.

There is little likelihood she could have avoided much, if any, of the serious repercussions she had been made to suffer.

‘Are you at all familiar with Svengali?’, she had asked.

‘I know some – not much – he was a very bad character, hurt many people. I believe he was Russian?’

‘One of the textbook answers is : became synonymous with an authority figure or mentor who exerted undue, usually evil influence over another person.’

The team leader, in hospital scrubs, holding a tablet, was leaning against the door – closely

adjacent to the red panic button on the wall. It was activated to be ‘On’ when triggered prior to entering the cell in which the three of them were.

If needed, once pressed, two guards would immediately enter the cell with pepper spray, ready to incapacitate as needed.

‘No – he was not Russian. You’re thinking of Rasputin, probably. Not the same type of character at all.’

‘Look at me’, she said. ‘May I call you by your nickname? Sunny”’

The girl raised her head slightly. Although her head was shorn closely, she still had magnificent eyelashes, and she used them to stunning effect.

Raising them now, to be not quite fully open, she offered a small hesitant smile.

‘Yes – yes. That’s okay. If I can call you by yours…’

The doctor was a bit startled and asked, with a slight chill in her voice, ‘What makes you think I have a nickname?’

‘Because – because you just do. Don’t you know what it is?’

‘No!’, she replied acidly. ‘No – I do not. But if you think I have one, of course – please do use it.’

‘Thank you, Frankie.’

______________________________________________________________________

The doctor took a deep breath, sighed, nodded to her colleague and said.

‘Okay Sunny. Our job here is multi-fold but with two elements of it being a little more important than the others. First, we want to help you to understand what both defines and motivates a narcissist. Why do we want to do that? Because, Antonio, who controlled you and hurt you, is a narcissist. We refer to that as NPD – narcissistic personality disorder.

And no, you should not blame yourself if you didn’t see it coming. Most, don’t.’

She paused, looking directly at Sunny.

Stepping forward she motioned that the three of them should sit down at the round table.

It was a rather famous design, a Saarinen tulip table and was chosen specifically for two reasons. The first, because it was round. The circular shape went a long way towards the promotion of equality.

The second reason was, that it’s trumpet base allowed it to be bolted to the concrete floor, but without any visible signs of such attachment. The connection mechanism was hidden inside the trumpet shaped base and could only be adapted with a very special tool.

In order to establish and maintain a sense of physical harmony in the cell, the chairs around the table were also Saarinen design, on matching trumpet bases. The interior mechanism that allowed such a chair, normally, to rotate or swivel, had been removed and the chair seat was locked in an unmoveable position. The chairs however, themselves, could be moved about the table and removed form the cell as need be.

The three of them sat.

The doctor, with a nod to the third person, said, ‘This is Abby, my assistant. She is a resident here in training and will serve as an observer. She will also be your point of contact should I not be readily available.’

‘Do you have any questions before we begin?’

Sunny, who was gazing at Abby, turned to face the doctor.

‘Not at this moment, no’, she said.

‘Okay. Let's start at the beginning. Please, as comfortably as you can, take us through your first encounters with Antonio. The where, the when and any events that framed the initial interaction.’

‘Where and how did you meet him?’

____________________________________________________________________________

‘Please – can you begin somewhere? Where did you first meet him, or see him for the first time?’

Sunny, who had been gazing at the floor, picking at the nails of her left hand distractedly, shuddered slightly and looked up, first at Abby who smiled slightly, then at Frankie.

‘We were out, just walking around, exploring. We had arrived in Venice only that morning

Alessandra and me – and we had slept through most of the day. We woke up about 4:00 o’clock, groggy, thirsty, hungry.’

‘We had no plan, Alex and I – we had arranged to spend 5 days in Venice and then board a cruise.’

She paused, glancing down at the table top.

‘After we got up, did the bathroom thing, got dressed, we pulled out our guide map and started talking about where to go, immediately, to find food and drink.’

‘We left the room, walked down the old staircase to the tiny lobby, nodded at the desk clerk and stepped out into the heat of the early evening.’

Frankie asked, ‘So -what time was that – do you recall?’

‘Yes. It was 6:30. Being August the sun was still sortof high, but we knew we were approaching dusk.’

‘Go on’

‘Well, we turned right and started to walk. We had thought we’d head towards Harry’s Bar.

It was such a landmark and so famous. We dawdled, window shopping. Although we ere hungry, we did have our bottled water with us. We spent some time in Piazza San Marco, people watching – and then walked on. We found ourselves in Calle Vallaresso – which was such a thrill because all the high end fashion boutiques were there. Missoni, Damiani – Luce.’

‘So, it was probably about 7:30 or so?’, Abby asked.

‘More like 8:00 o’clock. The stores had just closed up as we walked further on.’

‘And then’, she paused, looking uncertainly at Frankie, who waited.

‘Yes? And then?’

‘And then, we heard it.’

Abby shifted in her chair slightly, looking to her left to Frankie.

‘Heard what?’, Frankie asked gently.

‘We heard this, this angelic, soulful harmonica music. It was coming from just up ahead of us.

We looked at each other and started to walk a little faster. We got to Tiffany’s and could see, then, someone was standing back into the recessed entrance doorway.’

She smiled, remembering.

‘He was beautiful’, she said, in almost a whisper.

‘And the music – the sounds, it was a sensual, sexy kindof symphony. We stood there, watching him, mesmerized.’

‘Was it just the two of you?’

‘Not at first. When we got there about four or five others had gathered – all watching reverently as this angelic music floated about us.’

And then a security guard appeared in the glass of the door behind him. He was shaking his fist at him, a phone in one hand, motioning him ‘away’.

Then there was just the two of us. We were speechless, but before he could bend over to pack up his things we dug in our purses and dropped a bunch of lire into the soft Trilby hat by his feet.’

‘He smiled at us – like the sun bursting from behind a cloud. Thanked us – in Italian of course.

And then haltingly said, or indicated that we was going to leave and head over to Giardini Rial – and we could find him there is we wanted to.’

‘We bowed to him, with a bit of a theatrical sweep, and said we were going to eat first but we would find the giardini afterwards – and look for him.’

‘Reluctantly, we turned and arm in arm, headed down the calle towards the canal – to Harry’s’

______________________________________________________________________________

For his father, the boy’s name was irrelevant. His mother had named him Anton, but he wasn’t this father’s son and the mother was soon gone. So his father called him whatever suited the moment and his temper. The boy never uttered the word father.

He sat on a rocky outcrop which protruded into the Adriatic sea, dissecting sea urchins with his one and only friend Gino who was watching, always thoughtful, moving towards the next question.

‘Do fish have names?’

‘Of course, you know that’, Antonio’s concentration was intense, lips pursed, moving the knife expertly for his seven years, through the hard exterior shell, to the soft globular mass beneath that contained the yellowish ‘tongues’ and he knew felt like custard, ‘there’s carp and sole and salmon’.

‘No, Tony, I mean individual names that their parents call them?’

Antonio laughed; this was why he liked to spend time with Gino. It gave him some respite, some relief, some sense of what normal life could be.

‘Gino, you’re crazy, of course not. They don’t have a brain, how can they have a name, or think like us?’ Part of his enjoyment was seeing where Gino would go next. He was rarely disappointed.

‘I wonder if Salvatore who says he loves Christina will turn into a fish then. My dad told me Salvatore must have lost his brains when he caught him climbing across the clothes line between our house and Christina’s.

In the narrow vias and alleyways of Venice, the clothes lines were often hung between the window railings of opposite houses and it became a common way for younger and ardent admirers, of their beautiful classmates living opposite, to engage in the clandestine meetings that kept them alive; but they had to be slight, agile and able to fall well. The hospital was full of broken bones.

Christina was a few years above Antonio in school, but even at seven he recognized beauty. Perhaps because there was none in his life. Another reason he didn’t mind hanging around with Gino was because this friend was the only one who knew, the only one he could take off his t-shirt in front of, roll up the sleeves of his shirt. So when Gino saw new bruises on Antonio’s arms, new cuts on his legs, he never said much. But he brought him creams and lotions from his mother at home, to soothe his cuts, to take away the fire of bruises, the burning of the beatings. Antonio wondered if Gino’s mother knew, but he never asked. And Gino never let a thought disappear into the air, he just pursued it, but in a completely different direction.

‘But do you think the parents know which fish are theirs?’

‘No idea. They’ve got eyes though, so maybe they just recognize them by some special mark.’

‘Do you think they can still see when Pietro cuts their heads off?’

‘How?’

‘Well perhaps when they’re out of the water it’s like us drowning. Dad told me you see the whole picture of your life – like in the cinema. Maybe that happens to fish when they’re caught so they don’t need their bodies then. And if they had a good life all that goodness goes into whoever eats their body that night.’

Antonio wondered what it might feel like not to have a body, not to feel the pain of a thrashing, the notches on the belt searing his hands, not to feel humiliated. But he knew he would grow to be tall. His fingers were long, his body growing now so that he was taller than most of his classmates. And he knew Emilia liked him. But he couldn’t do anything with that knowledge; couldn’t ask her back to his house in the Via Fabrizi, one of the poorest parts of the city. The man who should have been a father to him made fun to his face of any friends he may have had, even though he hadn’t met them; the house was dirty, untidy with all the discarded clothes of the days before thrown into a corner, until that had to be washed.

‘Can’t you do anything useful boy. Get those clothes washed so I have something clean at least for the morning. You’re out of school, if you go, and I really don’t care, you’re out at 3 o’clock, start earning your keep.