Page 180 - The Grotesque Children's Book

Chapter 12.

The Ear with Wings

Santi had never known a deaf man before and found it fascinating how much Aurelio had
learned to convey in his art. Santi was several years younger than Aurelio and felt he had a tithe
the skills the deaf man had.

Aurelio filled notebooks with the most fantastical creatures: hydras with nine heads and
your usual mythological creatures, gods and heroes, yes, they all drew that sort of thing. But
Aurelio's creatures were different; strange, from a world unknown or unseen by anyone except
perhaps Signore Bosch. Missing limbs were replaced by just about everything you could think
of: vines, tree branches, tails, feathers, wheels, books, food, other creature's arms, animal
anatomy, and an endless variety of purely geometrical shapes: curls and curves, spirals, wisps of
weather such as fire, wind, rain or most prevalent, their torsos were either truncated or missing
altogether, fusing into a single pole or trunk or furniture leg. Santi understood the images
immediately, viscerally: Metaphors, analogies, symbols, all about his deafness, and feeling
malformed; visual representations of some portion of the human anatomy gone wrong. Poor
amico. How many of his creatures are doomed to have their legs or feet metamorphosed, into an
urn for a plant, or a tripod of small stool legs, like a coat rank or a stone birdbath.

Santi loved these tormented creatures of Aurelio's youth and imitated them, copied them,
incorporated them into his own art. A centaur head literally missing a torso; metaphorically
missing, say, half of his body. Aurelio had no ears; his creatures had no limbs. When Santi
copied Aurelio's limbless monsters, he felt he was painting pictures of himself: limbless without
either his mother or his young wife, Guilia. Santi felt he understood Aurelio. He felt they spoke
the same language through their frescos.

Santi knew that time was rapidly running out for Aurelio. If, in the next three years -- no,
now less than that -- two and a half years before young Tomaso DeSolo came of age and claimed
the inheritance. Aurelio had third months to “stipulate” for himself; that is, to learn how to
speak. (And pray that his father would annul the disinheritance papers; but that was another
matter for another day.)

“If only you can learn to speak before your brother's twenty-first birthday,” said Santi del
Meglio one day as they doused their sorrows over two tankards of ale at the Wheat and Chaff
tavern. Santi was wallowing over the recent loss of his young wife, Guilia. Tomaso! Aurelio
stabbed the wooden tavern table with a supper knife and stared into the tavern's fire, which
flickered hauntingly from the corner foot-stove, giving no heat.

“Have you written to Dr. Gerolano Cardano yet?” wrote Santi in his notebook. Actually,
Santi didn't write; rather he drew, because his deaf friend and he had developed a series of
symbols and sketchpad shapes which they had both come to feel was nearly an entire language

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