The Cardiff Giant

by Lockridge, Larry

  I had good reason to believe that Rimbaud left a notebook on Cyprus. I wanted that notebook, I wanted it! And I wanted to visit Béllapais in the North where Durrell had lived, thinking his shade might breathe words into me. I needed them.

  Another lure was William Shakespeare, most of whose Othello is set in Cyprus, probably Famagusta. I couldn’t know early on how much this tragic drama would impinge on my farce.

  In its contradictions Cyprus is a haunting enigma. Yes, it has everything—from splendid antiquities of the many cultures that have flourished there, to an enchanted geography of mountains, deserts, and beaches, to legendary cities, monasteries, mosques, and castles, to the celebrated haloumi cheese and zivanía brandy. But it suffers the worst consequences of climate change, the ethnic enmities that have spilt kraters of blood and still simmer here and there, the loathsome residue of rapacious mining and industry, the public-health menace of a greasy British diet, and the geopolitical disadvantage of proximity to both the Middle East and Africa, a pawn caught in the interplay of larger powers. It’s not much of a stretch to say that in Cyprus we find Planet Earth in miniature. After the ordeals of Brexit, with its improbable focus on a 310-mile internal Irish border, and the coronavirus pandemic, with its promiscuous feasting on a 24,901-mile ring of hapless humans, I feel it’s time to return Cyprus to the map of global awareness. If you stick with my memoir, you’ll be getting a parable of the human race in the early twenty-first century for ninety-nine cents.

  And I promise you adventures I couldn’t have made up, including dark forces intent on sabotaging my benevolent scheme. I admit to having little imagination but do have a memoirist’s habit of jotting everything down at day’s end. If you doubt my reliability, I’ve taken inspiration from Rimbaud and have tucked my own notebook somewhere in the vast library of the Oneida Community Mansion House in upstate New York, where my story ends and where I wrote this memoir over a period of three weeks. If you find my notebook, read it and decide for yourself whether I have exaggerated. But the staff doesn’t permit removal of anything from their library, even for private reading in one of their rental rooms. A ghostly impersonator of the Oneida Community founder, John Humphrey Noyes, will track down and bring to justice anybody who violates this rule. Unless you relish confronting a religious lunatic, I’d advise you to let my notebook rest unmolested among the relics of print culture that gather dust in the stately Mansion House left by the polyamorous utopians, who remind us that utopias come but mostly go.

  About the Author

  Larry Lockridge is a writer living in New York City. Professor Emeritus of English, New York University, and a Guggenheim Fellow, he is best known for the prizewinning biography of his father, Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr., author of Raintree County. The Cardiff Giant is first of four standalone yet interrelated novels, The Enigma Quartet, to be published by Iguana Books. www.LarryLockridge.com

  About the Illustrator

  Marcia Scanlon, painter and sculptor, has studios in Soho and Upstate New York. She has been represented by John Stoller, Gettler-Paul, Maxwell Davidson, and Central Booking. Her artwork is in personal, corporate, library, and museum collections here and abroad. She has recently completed two watercolor series based on Sappho's poetry and Joyce's Ulysses. www.marciascanlon.com