Adjective: Picaresque: 1. relating to an episodic style of fiction dealing with the adventures of a rough and dishonest but appealing hero. Noun: Picaresque novel: A novel relating the story of such a character.
The picaresque is not a new thing. Famous novels in this vein include Tom Jones, Huckleberry Finn, and, the granddaddy of them all, Don Quixote. You know, the tilting at windmills character. The meaning of picaresque novel also has the sense of an unscrupulous person wandering aimlessly and fallibly through a world of varied, but often dishonest people. Candide is another example of a novel of an unscrupulous young man wandering through a world that is by turns dangerous, hostile, and incompetent, and how he somehow manages to survive.
The Trail of a Feckless Ruffian?
Just recently, I have begun to feel that my own life is a picaresque novel. Here, the meaning of picaresque novel concerns not my behavior, but Leo’s. Leo, then, is the quintessential feckless ruffian who wanders through a world which barely makes sense.
This is the story element of my own interior narrative which is clicking and clicking and not quite catching. Leo is truly the modern picaresque anti-hero. And remember, like Huck Finn, the picaresque hero is somehow, undeservingly appealing. You feel you want them to win, to change, to “get it.” It depends on the novel, BTW, whether they “get it” or not. Sometimes, like in Candide, they do: Candide finishes by learning “we must tend our garden.” Sometimes, like in Huck Finn, you don’t see that at all, and the hero goes back to living in a barrel.
It’s two a.m. Saturday morning as I write this, and Leo is leaving town today, by last report. Last I heard he was staying in a hotel because no one would put him up.
I Give Leo his Documenti
He asked me to get his personal documents together from the family binder, which is full of plastic sleeves and pockets, the repository for birth certificates, passports, vaccination records, marriage certificates … foreign permission-to reside documents.
As I went through the documents last night I began to choke up. Here was Joline’s passport from when she was a baby. Here were all the kids’ baptismal certificates. Lives begun in all good faith.
And here are Leo’s passports. College aged Leo, young father Leo, middle aged Leo. Leo with a beard on the Sogiorno document for living in Italy.
I choked up more. I remembered how in the days of these pictures, my loyalty to Leo was pretty much complete; Leo could count on my loyalty without question. My life’s challenge was to keep him on the rails as he blustered his way through teaching and grad school. I couldn’t do it, of course, but that didn’t stop me from trying. I believed my picaresque hero could go straight in the end.
Looking over the passport copies, I clipped the documents together, and went to call Randa.
“What is it?” she asked, because we’d talked earlier at some length.
“The documents,” I choked out. “All the pictures… it’s awful …I tried to pack them up but … “
“What?”
“It’s so awful, All those years. Leo was young. Back then. We all were. My husband.”
“Yeah, it’s a lifetime,” she agreed.
“How did it all happen? How did it all go wrong?” Suddenly it all seemed too beautiful, the family, the children, the travels, the struggles …
And Then I Remember: Mexico
“I don’t know. When I reconnected with you last year, you were preparing to go to Mexico with him…”
Wham. The whole reminiscence thing stopped. “That Mexico trip.” I remembered. “That Mexico trip with it’s fighting that was so loud and so awful that I was relieved that the couple in the room next to us was from Russia and couldn’t understand the things that were said … but then, it didn’t matter, the volume and tone was enough. Oh my God. And afterwards Leo said, “well there were two good days out of five,” and I said
“Yes but the other three were a living hell.”
You see. This was why I saw my life was a picaresque novel: it just kept going and going and going in the same chaotic vein. And it was going to continue, until I died, or demanded that it stop. I had chosen the latter. This wasn’t the time to change my mind.
Stay The Course, Of Course
“Thank you for reminding me,” I told Randa. I put Leo’s documents in a binder clip, in a red shopping bag with his Metamucil and his semolina flour and an old book about keeping tropical fish that somehow got in my bookshelves and I put the bag on top of the two boxes where Andrew had packed Leo’s home theater system. I assume he’ll come and get his things. He probably kinda needs his birth certificate.
The boxes and the bag sit in the living room. Yes, my life is episodic. But the episodes with Leo all basically point to the same patterns. Only now, those patterns are going to be going elsewhere.
An imaginary picaresque imp in the background grins unevenly at me. I wonder for a second. But then I know: more Huck Finn than Candide. And it’s time for him to take off south, down the proverbial river.
My picaresque novel is going to end here.
