'Living with Ed and Frances' Part VII By Mikhail Souris

Part VII

"The Spider Chronicles" - Living with Ed and Frances

by Michael Eldridge

Spider genes implanted in goats

Canadian scientists have implanted spider genes in goats, resulting in silky strands in the animals’ milk that can be a form of suture to provide milk with healing qualities.

Financial Times May 21 2000

Back from over the mountains where there are no tourists. Decided not to kill my architect's pet rabbit in revenge for incompetence as he’s found some Albanian builders who will halve the cost of tiling the floors in my new house. He said so. Along the mountain pass between Foligno and Camerata you find farmers selling their wares of the past summer, namely potatoes, lentils and a type of barley called farro...oh and onions too. The idea is that you buy a sack or two of each and watch them sprout and rot under the kitchen table. Driving past them today must have triggered off the memory of buying such a month ago. So I get back late and hungry and think potatoes for dinner.

I search for a sack I'd bought a month ago in dim light under table, there to find Ed inside the sack as I search for the in-between size ones.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking.

He’s already read the news about spider goat’s milk and is considering donating his genes to a potato.

Not at all! There’s more to it than that.

Ed and Frances are asking me something; I know it.

You ask me whether I can fly over in July and I can’t concentrate on a reply just at this moment because right before me, as I write, just next to the mouse in fact, sits, or maybe I should say is situated, the most perfectly formed baby tortoise. Extracted from the dog Porgy’s mouth just five minutes ago.

Rosie and Cesare are off to Pisa fighting a court case with a Sard and I’d taken Porgy, Bess and Pako for a short walk before the May heat built up. This entails screaming their names one after the other for half an hour and making sure that always two are in tow. Otherwise they’re off hunting deer, wild boar - and catching tortoise.

The baby tortoise is peeping out so I think a bit of lettuce is in order.

I’d forgotten about the part by the lower field we call the ‘Tortoise Patch’. Here, every year at about this time, out troop the baby tortoises across the dirt road and off they walk to who knows where. And if you’re lucky, you’ll catch them at it. Trooping off to who knows where.

Now it happens that tortoises are a particular passion of Pako and his yearly delight is to hang around down there (to whence I’ve currently lost him) and march out after an hour or so with one of the poor creatures in his mouth. Does nothing to them but won’t release them and the only thing to do is wait for him to doze off in the afternoon and sneak up, grab it from his mouth and take it back to the lower field.

Now if you are following this story closely you might have guessed that Pako and Bess are the parents of Porgy. And this is the fascinating thing. Porgy has inherited Pako’s passion for baby tortoises, which he too walks around with in his mouth.

As we walk up the hill, Alfredo drives up from his Friday morning shopping in his new turbo diesel and tells me not to worry about the baby tortoise in Porgy’s mouth. They have hard shells he says. Bright, these Venetians, I think and I say thanks Alfredo.

On the desk the baby tortoise is mouthing and peeping at me with one eye.

Think I’ll scrub the lettuce plan and return it to its mum.

And I wonder as I do this how tortoise parents bring up their young? How do they feed them?

Haven't a clue.

I’ll ask on the Internet later when I check out Rosie's idea.

The one about Ed and Frances.

The one about them maybe asking me something and me not understanding what it is they’re asking.

The one about Spiders in Cyberspace.

Rosie calls in a panic. They’ve had a rough day. Back from the day in court fighting a land case with a Sard farmer. It looks bad as the case has been suspended for a week whilst a judge weighs the evidence. Immediate problem is the hay they’ve cut on the road to Montenero. It needs three days to dry and has had only two and they’re going to take a chance and bale it because of storm threat and would I help. I hate hay baling. I did it for 5 years at Podalto, the farm that consumed so much of my life for so long.

I love to look at the medieval paintings of hay bailing in the Art Museum however. In those days it never rained and people sang all-day and shared bread and wine. Kids came along too and dogs wagged happily amongst the bailers, begging a leg of chicken or perhaps just a bone. These days it's tougher, it's faster.

No laughter, no picnics.

Yesterday evening it was touching 35 degrees C and suffocatingly humid as we pulled into the hayfield.

The baler man turned up with a historical mechanical specimen. It was once red and shiny with an impressive array of levers, which worked a dream to determine the length of the bale, and how tightly the hay was compressed. These options had diminished over the years and now the baler man just had one piece of string attached to one remaining functioning lever, which he tugged in accordance with what? I had no idea. My job was to follow the van and wave and shout every time (in this case every 20 metres) the piece of string didn’t fulfill its function and allowed the churning grinding faded red museum item to spew out bales which were wired up only on one side or the other. Result? Heat exhaustion, dehydration, a determination always in future to sneeze and point to bad back if ever asked to help bale hay ever again.

It’s a horrible job.

Ed went for his first car ride this morning. It’s hot again. Just been in to book a flight for San Francisco.

I was wearing shorts and driving back I noticed Ed was attached to them yo-yoing up and down to the rhythm of some music I’d taped from the film Magnolia. This means he was in the travel agents with me.

This means he knows my movements this summer.

Frances I’ve decided can’t be pregnant.

She’s a water spider and there would have to be a water bell.

Tales from the Garden