FRESH YARN presents: The Golden Mean ... by Antonella Gambotto-Burke

FRESH YARN presents:

The Golden Mean
By Antonella Gambotto-Burke

I only have one aunt, and she is related to me by marriage and not blood. My mother is an only child and my father has a younger brother and my aunt married my father's brother after he pestered her. I call her Auntie Drac after the caps fell off her two front teeth, briefly leaving her -- or so she said -- with funny pointy bits that once were teeth and this image (my elongated and long-throated aunt with slanting eyes and little fangs) made me laugh so much, she really bristled.

A few weeks ago, she traveled to Santa Fe from Sydney to visit her eldest son, who is to be married for the second time later this year to the same woman. (They first married in Las Vegas, an act which rippled ecumenical waters.) I am the senior of seven cousins, intrigued by yogis and litigation, addicted to reading, prolix, mad for Bill Laswell (sitar, monotonic declarations, bass), and I have A Past: with my cowboy hat and skull-and-crossbones beanie and antique Javanese bronze Buddha head and love of standing on my head, I am probably the most eccentric of the seven.

This hat thing -- a source of mortification for my poor husband -- first manifested at the aforementioned cousin's fifth birthday party. My aunt had arranged each party hat to the right of every paper plate: the girls were to wear flat chamber-maid numbers and the boys all got glorious Merlin hats encrusted with rivers of real glitter. Even at seven, I rebelled against sexism and so swapped my dumb cardboard headdress for the sparkling golden minaret which I then jammed on my unusually large head (I take a man's hat size). Strutting out into the sunshine, I was as resplendent as a king, and posed for photographs with my knees apart until my mother cuffed me: You're a girl!

But I digress. In Santa Fe, my aunt sought a house of God in which to pray. She has always had a passion for metaphysics and has ardently practiced Catholicism all her life. As the French say, she is spirituelle. Where my mother's attention is held only by diamonds and movies starring Tony Curtis in his prime, my aunt studies the symbols of other worlds, homeopathy, naturopathy, and, in order to please my very particular uncle, Italian cooking, trying not to mind too much when he asks her to fry brains. She is also taking embroidery classes so that her eldest daughter (a merchant banking-type who is also to be married, but for the very first time) will know the pleasure of walking down the aisle wearing a garter embroidered by her mother's love. (Her other daughter, who marches for peace and wears little bells and dated a part-Polynesian idealist, leaves for Thailand in eight weeks to work with the poor.)

In Santa Fe, my Auntie Drac found the most exquisite chapel she had ever seen. Built in the 1870's and inspired by the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, the Our Lady of Light Chapel is the first example of Gothic architecture west of the impious Mississippi. Rose window and bas-relief of da Vinci's The Last Supper aside, it houses a thing of wonder to architects and engineers: a thirty-three step spiral staircase, the full weight of which rests on the final tread. There is no central or flanking support, and for years, there was no banister. My aunt said that from the ceiling, it is no more than a nautilus shell, as beautiful as spiral nebulae or sunflower heads or the numerical sequence -- 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 -- discovered by Leonardo Fibonacci, the thirteenth century mathematician whose numbers correspond with the Golden Mean.

Symbolically, the Golden Mean represents Source in every sense. The curvature of the spiral correlates to the feminine. (My lean aunt will object to this; of the two, my uncle is the more curvaceous.) Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York finds its expression in the spiral, as does The Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq. This spiritual dimension is not accidental. Birth and death: one spirals into the other, and then again. Thoth, the ibis-headed Egyptian god of the moon, magic, and writing, is depicted as having a spiral on his head, and popes also enjoy spirals on their scepters. The Sufis spin themselves into a trance, as my brother and I once spun around our living room until the world itself reeled and we lay on those cold marble floors, laughing and queasy and woozy and exhausted, sharing the same spiraling DNA.

My aunt surrendered to the staircase's mystery: the thing was built by a carpenter who then vamoosed. This man -- believed by the Sisters to be their patron, Saint Joseph the Carpenter -- appeared from sunny nowhere on a donkey on the ninth day of a Novena (nine days of devotions) with his hammer and a T-square and big tubs in which to soak the wood. Intuiting the flaw in the chapel's design, he built a staircase to the choir loft that would not further compromise the compromised congregation. Aesthetically, it has the ease of a Strauss waltzer. There are no purchase records of the materials and he asked for no payment. My aunt was awed.

The miraculous, she says, is everywhere. She refuses the prosaic as Hollywood starlets recoil from fudge; she will not countenance pessimism, and expends energy on hope. She is so loved by her two adult daughters that they call on her most every day. Meaning is important to her, and religion is a school of meaning. Outside the chapel, she bought me a silver Navajo bear paw pin because it represents -- or imparts -- strength and healing. She drew a smoochy mouth on the envelope -- the top lip on the flap; the bottom, on the envelope itself -- but when she licked it, the lips did not meet and so she filled the space between them with teeth: a Cameron Diaz smile.

I knelt down in the chapel and prayed, she said, and then I started crying because I thought of you. She prayed and prayed I would be helped, and prayed and prayed I would be healed. While I -- then a molecular cloud of sorts and little more -- silently stared at my white bedroom walls and out of the window at nothing, she walked the streets of Santa Fe and implored God on my behalf. My darling 32-year-old brother killed himself at midnight on October 19, you see, and more clearly than anyone, my aunt -- with whom, because of tiresome Mafioso-type interfamilial wrangling, I have had little to do with over the years -- saw that great big holes had been shot through my heart and head and that if someone didn't help me stanch the flow of blood, I, too, would drift away and die.

This loving equanimity of hers rests in her heritage. My Auntie Drac (whose maiden name incorporates that most beautiful of English words: free) is not Italian but Australian, and her searing frontier love is the reason my cousins are half-sane. The Royal Tenenbaums were modeled on my family of origin, or so I thought when I sat and wonderingly watched that movie, and my uncle -- whilst by no means as operatically peculiar as my law-changing father (essays on the legal implications of Gambotto can be found in universities around the world) -- is also strange. He sits at the head of the table and whenever my aunt leaves the room, steals the fruit. She cannot stop him. Doctors have warned him of dangerously high sugar levels and wavering difficulties with insulin, but it really is, as John Malkovich so memorably shrugged in Dangerous Liaisons, beyond his control. Like a 160-pound possum, he creeps into the kitchen after she has gone to bed and ferrets through the cupboards for her stash of peaches or bananas or grapes.

The man would don a balaclava and climb in through a bathroom window with a crowbar for a nectarine. (During the day, he feigns respectability in some capacity for the government.)

His mother -- my Nonna Mentina -- was a narrow-waisted battleaxe from Piedmont with solid gold ball earrings that stretched her lobes so that in gusts of wind, they swung like that pendulum in Edgar Allan Poe's sepulchral pit. (Interestingly, my grandfather bore a resemblance to Vincent Price.) Her breasts were heavy and she was delicate in build, but also housed a ferocity since seen only in Pinochet. She poured boiling water on feral kittens and bought chickens live in order to decapitate them (this sadism was justified with palaver about freshness).

It is not difficult to picture her grunting over a sink of blood in the same way the disemboweled Mishima grunted when that sword missed his neck and instead plunged into his back. She ruled a household of three men with rare confidence: they cowered when she roared. Any one of them could have overwhelmed her, but did not dare. (When my twentysomething father was late home, she would shove his mattress down the stairs and into the garden).

Dainty in furs, she swore like a crack whore in withdrawal.

The idea of one of her sacred sons falling in love with a genetically inferior Australian was too much for Nonna Mentina, and she stalked the girl with the word free in her surname for months. My aunt would find her skulking in the dress-racks of the clothing store in which she worked, hoping to catch my aunt in a compromising position with a customer or perhaps dealing smack. When confronted, my grandmother would affect total ignorance of English and back away, waving her hands, squawking and undoubtedly wishing my aunt were one of her chickens. She would later complain to my uncle that his wife's Anglo-Saxon incompetence endangered her grandchildren's lives and that the (impeccable) house was a sty. If my aunt dared criticize my grandmother, my uncle would rise, a tsunami, and defend his mother like the First Amendment.

I had no such problems as I played the daughter in the real-life Italian production of The Royal Tenenbaums and was thus immune from scolding. Live with lovers, wear rented stockings, smoke ganja with rock stars, pierce my nose: nobody cared. My job was to be clever and that was all. You're a witch! I cried as Nonna Mentina chased me around her little bungalow wielding the small saucepan in which she fried the most delicious potatoes in the world. You never bought my father a single toy when he was a child and you hit him! I was too young and too fast and she was breathless by the time we reached the living room. You -- she would begin, you -- but there was a flicker in her eyes that spoke of an affection she had never been allowed to show.

Her own mother had died when she was a child, you see, and she had to look after her drunken father and raise her siblings alone. She shared two bottles of wine with her father every day at lunchtime and every household chore was hers. After she married, she told him that she was leaving Italy for good. She visited his house the day before she left, the same day he committed suicide by hurling himself down the stairs while she was eating lunch. I imagine her hearing a thud and shout, the crack of bones, pausing with a piece of bread or glass in her small hand, and then running out to find her father dying of malevolence at the foot of the stairs. She must have hated him.

I met her sister years later during a European spree. Zia Pnin -- somewhere Nabokov is nodding -- was a real potato of a woman with a puff-toad face, few teeth and two white swinging plaits: she looked like a Star Wars senator -- not Padme Amidala, but Orn Free Taa, the Twi'lek Senator from the Loyalist Committee -- and spoke an unintelligible dialect. My grandfather's sister was just as weird. A refined woman, she lived in a pristine apartment near the Alps with her married lover and a collection of life-sized stuffed toys. By the white silk sofas and potted palms, a towering Topolino (Mickey Mouse), Paperino (Donald Duck), and idiotically-voiced Topo Gigio (big-eared and whiskered, decked out like a gondolier) crazily staring into space. She thought them cute. I was half-scared to death. (I feared they might try to jump me in the hall.)

Every Gambotto in the world is originally from the same village in Piedmont. (For those who swoon over the moonlight and roses of the Italian language: my surname means "short stumpy legs"). My aunt elected to be related to these freaks, but I was without choice and wished I could have stayed away. My father once took me to a mountaintop restaurant with Ugo, his best friend. I returned from the pristine blue-tiled Turkish bathroom and whispered: Papa, they haven't built the toilet yet. My aunt was also dragged -- if by my sentimental uncle -- up mountains and to farms, to churches and the House of the Plush Monsters and the conference rooms of Senator Pnin, and sat through dinners at which everyone spoke Italian. She was polite and answered when she was called Rita even though her name is Ruth. (Italians cannot pronounce th and thus she was called Rita or Root, which in the Australian vernacular means fuck as in, Fancy a root?)

Nonna Mentina once received a call from a man who assured her that he wanted nothing better than to penetrate her forcefully, and all night long. Bewildered by the unfamiliar English, my grandmother diligently listened. When she heard the word root, she cried out -- no, no, you have wrong number! -- and gave him the number of my aunt. Your mother-in-law told me to call, the prank caller said, laughing deeply before launching into stream-of-consciousness obscenities.

Auntie Drac screamed when she walked headlong into the headless chickens swinging from my grandmother's bathroom ceiling and, covered in blood that time, struggled to deal with my grandmother's old world guile; the sister of Senator Pnin was a formidable opponent. Nonna Mentina was wrong in undermining my good aunt, but at least she was an equal opportunity hater: she also detested my mother. In the photographs of my parents' glamorous wedding -- they were married in a great cathedral by the Monsignor -- my aunt is smart in eyeliner and winklepickers and Breton hat with pleated tulle (she looked like Dorian Leigh in her heyday or an Edith Head model) but my grandmother is scowling and, like a coffin, draped in black. She stands apart, a vial of emotional plutonium, clutching her purse with a bag-snatcher's zeal, her curls plastered to her head like those of a Caesar's, beside her spectral husband and his distant smile.

Unlike my aunt, Nonna Mentina had no real spiritual feeling but went through all the motions of Catholicism and really loved a curse. I seem to remember a piece of lace she demurely wore over her hair and crucifixes and a depiction or depictions of Jesus, whom she misunderstood as an enthusiastic advocate of constant suffering. My aunt, on the other hand, sincerely believed the teachings of the Church. She wanted gentleness. This combination of strict Roman Catholicism and her natural -- and irresistible -- wilderness sensibilities was unusual, and the era wasted her. Raised to please, she shelved her own preferences until middle age, when she rebelled.

She told my grandmother to go to hell. (It only took her twenty years.) She started classes. A handsome retired football player flirted with her but she told him to go away. She began working at a childcare center for twelve dollars an hour and came home with funny stories about toddlers, and sand from the sandpit in her hair. When my uncle bangs the table with his fist and howls for food, she does not tip the plate over his head as I would, but graciously serves him and remarks that she was not placed upon this earth to be his slave. He grumbles and snarls a little and rolls his eyes, but is bereft without his leggy wife of three decades. When she was late home after searching with her daughter for a bridal gown that did not look like an avalanche in Gstaad (complete with casualties), he was furious. He does not like the world without her.

I was amazed when I first discovered that they actually trudge to church and back each week. You're kidding me! I cried. And then: Are you kidding me? But it was true. And here was I, gradually evolving into a species of Buddhist, absorbed by levels of being, intermittently studying reincarnation, speaking to my brother's spirit, meditating on a petal, listening to my clairvoyant friend tell me of the angels -- some of them ten feet tall -- who flock to Tao temples, and all this in my cowboy hat or Jolly Roger beanie.

My aunt took my hand after a dinner she had cooked for ten. I had demolished the prosciutto and Fibonacci-sequence artichokes and discreetly fingered the chocolate from the eclairs. We were left at the table with the plates. The others were watching television and talking. I can't imagine what you've been through, she quietly said. I stopped -- the simplicity of her statement pierced my heart -- and I looked at her, this woman of God, my malachite-eyed Australian aunt.

Maurits Cornelis Escher, whose spiral staircases echo throughout the worlds of mathematics and high art, once said: The consistency of the phenomena around us, order, regularity, cyclical repetitions and renewals, have started to speak to me more and more strongly all the time. The awareness of their presence brings me repose and gives me support. In my pictures I try to bear witness that we are living in a beautiful, ordered world, and not in a chaos without standards. My aunt, who knows nothing of numbers, understands. All she needed to know was that I had lost my brother, and she was there.