About Me
Very well,although I am obliged from the outset to acknowledge that my origins were until quite recently a veritable mystery, as origins often are, even unto myself. The following narrative I give you as it was told to me by the man I call father, who after nearly a quarter-century of silence, was compelled to unburden himself to me by an unexpected and quite sudden brush with death. Particular details being later verified, to the extent such things can, by the woman I call mother, this is the tale of how I came to be, and to be Here.
My original mother was a young Russian courtesan from the district of Tot'ma, in the northwest of Vologda Oblast. I am told she was as ardently persued for her grace and elegance, as for her stunning beauty and feminine charms. Her name, reputedly, was Tatyana Yekatrina Devejya, although due to the circumstances of her brief life this is almost assuredly not her true name. For several years prior to my birth she was attached to an elite communist politician, one of those brazen hypocrites, as common now as then, that fancied himself an "aristocrat of the People." That he treasured my mother as one treasures an expensive pet or prized possession, I do not doubt, but for our purposes here it is sufficient to know that, as is often the case with this sort of love, my mother found the relationship somewhat unfulfilling, to say the least.
Fulfillment came, literally as well as figuratively, as they vacationed one summer in Spain, in the person of a dashing and quite skilled young bullfighter from Cadiz who's name, despite all effort to the contrary, I have been thoroughly unable to determine. This gallant matador, my original father, so captivated my mother with his charisma that I was conceived on the eve of their very first meeting, somewhere long forgotten in the city of Madrid. Their trysts continued until, no doubt growing suspicious of her glowing manner and conspicuous absenses, my mother's patron ended their vacation early and returned them, with all haste, to Moscow.
Some months later, humiliated by my mother's "condition", her patron, who had hoped to possess her exclusively in marriage, took to increasing severity and violence. I don't know the specific act that caused my mother to flee her homeland forever and seek to reunite with my father, but her exile would seal both our fates.
Alas, her reception in Spain was not what she had hoped. Upon seeing a glorified Russian whore, for all intents and purposes, carrying his bastard seed, my father chose to abandon her to fate rather than risk public scandal and loss of status, as perhaps any well-bred man of taste can understand. Heartbroken and destitute, my mother gave birth to me in a jesuit monastary somewhere in the rural Spainish countyside near the southern border with Portugal. This is where I spent the first year of my life.
It is said that she killed herself, but it is also said that just prior to her untimely death, my mother's Russian patron was seen to be in Spain in the company of two unidentified men. Suicide or murder, all I was told is that the priests found her broken body at the base of a particularly jagged ravine, and after stripping her tender flesh of anything of material value, left her to slowly rot unburied in the sun, God's punishment against her mortal remains for the presumption of taking her own life.
I was given, if that term even applies, to the care of a caravan of Andalusian gypsies with whom I would spend the next eighteen months of my life traveling the length and bredth of the Iberian peninsula, across mediterranean Europe and into Turkey.(Although I have no memory this time aside from vague impressions, this formative period seems to have marked my soul with two traits, an unquenchable desire to wander the earth along with an unbridled passion for Flamenco guitar.) Apparently the gypsies originally intended to raise me as their own, but perhaps sensing that I lacked their inborn acumen for deception, and being so obviously marked as a "giorgio", or outsider, as they say, by my somewhat lighter pigmentation and white hair, upon reaching Ankara I was promptly sold, overpriced I'm sure, to Arab slavers.
I'm told the slavers had quite a bit of stock, mostly young girls, for the obvious reason, to be sold at various ports along both coasts of the Red Sea. At market in the city of Khourmaksar somewhere in the province of Aden, in the barbarous nation of Yemen, I apparently caught the eye of the adolescent concubine of an Arab nobleman. I was purchased as a gift for her, and for the next year of my life, I was doted upon and raised in a rich man's harem by this girl, my second mother, not yet even a woman herself.
The first true memories I can recall(although they are so faint I always considered them mere fancies of the imagination) are from this land, of the majestic emptiness of the endless desert. It holds a beauty and attraction no words can explain. A man could spend a lifetime wandering the dunes, yet never penetrate the mystery that surrounds him in every direction. The cold of night brings the whole of heaven down to the earth, Nuit embraces Hadit, whilst an unwary soul might seemingly slip into the infinite blackness between the stars and be forever lost. Nowhere is desolation more profound than amongst these eternal oceans of sand.
In my third year this land became the first true home I ever knew. My second mother lavished all the affections upon me demanded by her blossoming maternal instincts, spoiling me constantly with some treat from Za'afaran market or supervising my childhood play along the breathtaking Gold Moors. Having been told that I was British to fetch a higher price, she saw to it that I was tutored in the appropriate language. My sojourn here would prove short, however, as one day nearly a year after my arrival, my second mother displeased her master in some fashion, probably pertaining to the art of love. Possibly thinking her care of me too great a distraction from her care of his pleasures, and as a punishment to womanhood in a still patriarchial land, I was to be sent alone into the empty sands to meet my end.
Luckily for me, upon hearing of this my second mother begged, pleaded, and turned all of her feminine persuasion upon him, until it was agreed I would merely be sent away. Apparently a man of his word, as well as a man with contacts, within the month I found myself bound for America, where I was given to a most loving and caring couple in eastern North Carolina, who for medical reasons were unable to bear children themselves.
The rest of my narrative is as remarkable in its mundane contrast from the first several years of my life. The couple I know as my parents raised me, I went to school, grew up, had several pet cats, played street-hockey, ineffectually rebelled and tinkered with my identity as a teenager, and all the rest.
As to my name, according to very sketchy Russian documentation my original mother christened me Vladislav Piotr Devejya, from this Vladislav became Vlad became Todd. I dropped the second "d" as being redundant in a fit of youthful idealism sometime when I was in high school. Apparently my first name George, which I have never used, came from the gypsy slang "giorgio", which I am told I used to respond to as a child. I took my new father's surname(which for matters of privacy I hesitate to mention) until the age of nineteen, when he left my mother, I thereafter began using her maiden name(again, privacy forbids me from revealing it). This sufficed until very recently, as several members of her side of the family disowned me in order to procur my share of a modest inheritence. This is how I came to the name Tod de'Aden, after the mysteriously remote land of my faintest recollections. This is the story of my origins and my life as I have been made to understand them, and, upon my honor, if one word of this tale is knowingly false then so are they all!............................P.S. I shred on guitar, I'm pretty nasty on bass, and I'm respectable behind a drum kit.
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