Here are the opening paragraphs from Davos, the first book in the Franco Fasiolo series, which recounts the adventures of its eponymous protagonist, who is a forensic botanist and reluctant cosmopolitan. I hope you enjoy it!
DAVOS
A Franco Fasiolo Novel
Chapter One
And with that, Franco closed the door and
began to walk.
The road up out of the valley, which he
reached after several minutes of weaving through the landscapes of modern rural
life: the clusters of advertisements for real estate agents, dentists and
propane suppliers, the emotional pleas for solar energy sprayed on three-hundred
year old walls, the lengths of enormous black pipe that had never found
their purpose, the hokey kitsch that says more about the deterioration of urban
hearts than it does about country life, the modern buildings that evoke only
embarrassment for not looking like they were made by a fourteen-year-old, the
stately homes that communicate the cruel inequality of times past in the
richness of their design and construction, the plastic playthings of a group of
children inside the security of a prefabricated fence, and the baying dogs who see it as their duty to ferociously protect it all. Franco walked past all of
it, still unable to find reconciliation among it and with it after all of these
years. Where were they doing it right? Surely not the cities, where this was
all you see, and therefore did not see, and surely not the villages that had
little in the way of these things, mostly because they had little in the way of
anything, people included. There, high in the mountains, you saw other things:
the lonely cow locked in a dark stall, the stolid donkey staring straight ahead
at nothing for minutes at a time, the frantic mama goat and her kids, who comes
charging at you and, forced to stop by the fence that stands between you,
unleashes a gush of urine at your feet, either by accident or in greeting. What
does she want? Food? Affection? A chat? Franco would love to stop but what
would he do? What would he say? So he would keep walking, hoping that it were
true that animals forget the pain of their disappointment within a few minutes.
A fig tree, ridiculous with fruit, cheered
him up. It seemed to not know, not mind or not care about the squalor around
it, and in fact was doing everything it could to alleviate it. What abundance
of energy caused it to push all of those fruits out of the ends of its twigs?
What sense of duty and purpose caused it to throw itself with such abandon into
such an expensive display? Would anyone eat them? Bursting, big as your palm,
and here high in the mountains, alone among the larch and birch and pine, like
that African man he saw on the train in his pajamas. Yes, Franco knows he
should not call them pajamas, which is an Urdu word, but that was not why. What
was it, something about cultural relativity? So if culture is relative, why is
it not okay to call them pajamas? Maybe he would not mind if I called them
pajamas, maybe even like it, maybe find it funny?, Franco thought. If someone called his shirt a blouse, he would not mind. Rigan, in Hausa. He
would quite like it. Ihembe in Zulu. Not bad. What was the fig tree
thinking, so far away from the world of shirts and pajamas and molded plastic
slides, from somber cows and excited goats. No, not from the goat. There
was something of the goat in the fig tree, and vice versa. One time Franco saw
a cow lactating on a beach in Hong Kong, wisps of sticky milk whipping in the
wind around her teats and hind legs, long white strands of fat and sugar that dripped
to the sand, inedible in their contaminated state. What a waste. He should have
picked that fig, gravid with its own lurid progeny, scarlet wrapped in green,
Christmas time.
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