A Condensed History of North East I

From the words of recently collected journals, reports, hearsays, and correspondences


Part I: Far East, Middle East, and Italy

This is one of the browse-through side-stories about the history of North East I: Counting back events from several years before his Splitting up to the era of the first East, six centuries and one decade before he became Maiv Norte and Evan Timor. He used to be only one, a lone child of a Victorian era traveler who crossed continents until he (the traveler) found himself broke in the bowels of—as his (the traveler’s) friend Mycroft’s brother would call it—the great cesspool.

London was not the most beautiful city to be in those days despite the picturesque daguerreotype reproductions we see in books, and despite of the amazing progress that the 64-year period brought in. It was also not particularly profitable from our people’s perspective as it was a hundred years before it would be a lucrative place to be an overseas worker, and more than a hundred years before a bigshot third-world Media Empire would have picked it up as location for a big-bucks blockbuster. But nevertheless, North East I worked there as a nurse at a very young age.

North East I was North East I’s real name. He was the son of Middle East and the grandson of Far East. Middle East was the second in a brood of three, but both his brothers have died in two separate battles; both of which were kept secret from the rest of the world and were done in unpopulated sea banks between India and Egypt, and both of which together were the totality of The Secret West Asian War. After the young men’s death, Far East brought himself, his wife, and Middle back to their oriental homeland. They were almost out of funds and the three of them would have traveled home by foot, but Middle’s mother Perlas didn’t have any. Luckily for them but not for a British tourist they came across in Syria, Far was a first-class swindler. The con he pulled was later restaged by North’s friend Victor Lustig, in a much grander scale involving the Eiffel Tower.



About three years later since they got home, Middle decided to go back to the west, but much father west this time. He planned to retrace Marco Polo’s route even though he barely had an idea who Marco Polo was. He only used the idea to convince his father to help finance his trip. The old man agreed and opted that all three of them must go. To lower their traveling expenses and ensure faster journey, Middle killed his mother and framed a nonexistent rogue for the crime. But he was not as cold blooded as anyone would hastily surmise, for he even gave his mother an ample headstart to run. He would later confess to Mycroft that he committed the murder to save the poor old woman from further difficulties.

When father and son reached the shores of Naples, Far figured they should stay in that province for a while until they make more money to continue their journey. The old half-Chinese had no idea they were only a few days away from where Marco Polo’s expedition ended, but then again, neither did Middle. Instead of moving north, they went to look for lodging in Campania.

They felt at home in Italy mainly because of the noodles. For a short time, they made honest living working as cobblers in a small shoemaking shop, where they prognosticated about a future shoemaking industry boom in Asian sweatshops for around one-third the European production cost.

One day, a neighborhood gang who called their group Famiglia abducted and killed the shoe shop owner, because that man reportedly raped the daughter of a barber deeply indebted to him. Far was so amused by the idea of the Famiglia (and with some research, he found out they were composed of enduring cammorristi) that he made up his mind to again go back to his native home and establish an organized society which would be the first Triad. And he will call it that, as it would be patterned after the likes of the Three Harmonies Society. The following week, he joined a caravan to the east.



Before his old man left him to travel alone, Middle had been starting to get disturbed of Far's crazy ideas about the future that they wouldn’t even live long enough to see. That future can be witnessed by his soon to be born son, though, if the then unborn North lives to be more than a hundred years old. Middle’s pregnant girlfriend Maria mentioned about a traveling band of sellers selling miracle- medicines that promise to keep their consumers forever young. The two of them laughed, because that was something to laugh at. Then, Middle’s mind backtracked to where his family got its strange-for-Asian surname.

Their first names, he understood, were only a product of his grandfather and father’s uncanny sense of humor. It was being an East that bothered him. He realized he wasn’t even sure they were Asian. They looked Asian, yes, but only as much as they looked a little of every other race. The real reason he wanted to go places was because he was looking for somewhere to rightfully fit in, because he never felt at home in any one of the dozens of towns and cities his family had lived in: not in Nanjing, Hangzou, Wuhen, Changsha, Hanoi, Chiang Mai or Kolkata; and not anywhere in the other countries they've been: not in Nepal, Jordan, Syria, Greece, Bulgaria, or Romania. Not that he could not fit in anywhere, it was exactly the opposite of that. He could fit in perfectly with any group of people, but he never felt contented. He would later be convinced that his search was futile and they have no real need to find any answer. He would die happy, in the hands of a corrupt French deputy named Daubreq.



Middle met Maria, daughter and solo child of a deceased couple, in Reggio Calabria. She inherited their small house and set it up as a traveler’s inn when they died, a year before their northward journey. Middle was her first customer ever since the inn was first opened. On the first night, Middle complained of bedbugs. So on the second night, they shared Maria’s bed.

Middle found out the morning after that Maria was affianced to a young influential farmer with connections in the local ‘Ndrangheta. He found this out because he woke up to a house reluctantly noisy with half a dozen mobster mob. The small army was made up of men with knives and quaint handguns and pre-Winchester shotguns. None of them attacked. Middle gathered they must be waiting for someone, but he had no idea what in the world was really happening and where Maria was, and why that lady did not make him breakfast. He got up, pulled on his chinos and shirt and snapped his suspenders as he listened to the loud whispering of the rural gangsters. All he was sure of was it was trouble. He pushed a stool against the door just to give them an impression later that he meant to keep them out somehow while he was trapped in, and thus he bought himself some time, which he suddenly realized he did not need anyway.

Maria was at that time outside the house, flat on the grassless ground a few tens of feet away, and crying the dusty earth off her eyes. Vincenzo, her betrothed, left her there like a hostage with three lads each armed with either a cudgel or a crop. When the fiancée went into the inn and kicked the bedroom door open, he found nobody there.

This was because Middle went out through a window, yes, as simple as that, and then went around the back of the house. Upon realizing that the five or six fools plus Vincenzo were too eager to deal him some damage that they all waited by the bedroom door, Middle nonchalantly walked towards escape. But he saw Maria with the lads and remembered she might be starting to bear him a son, so he walked up to the three of them, aware that these guards had no idea who their enemy was. He gave the three the news that the beating had begun in the inn and said they should not let the older boys have all the fun.

However, Vincenzo was not much of a fool like those uomini who were left clueless. Upon being sure the empty room was really empty and after checking under the bed and in the closets, he blasted out without any word to anyone, except for the call for his horse. Middle had shirked them and now Vincenzo wanted to get him alone.

He saw Middle and Maria riding behind a hay cart, sped up his steed, managed to catch up within a yard from them, and finally fell down to his death when Middle speared him with a pitchfork, which he dodged, but caused him to be dismounted for he was too busy fumbling with his pump-action 24-incher weapon that he forgot to hold on to the twine and the steed. He fell down head first in high velocity on a rock, eighteen feet below beside a cliff. Vincenzo was not much of a fool, but only enough of it to have had himself killed that way.

Middle and Maria escaped the ‘Ndrangheta and traveled northwestward to France. That is where North East will be born and Middle would be killed, but the latter event would happen on another trip several years away.




Continued on Part 2: Heading East to South East

Copyright 2008 Klaro de Asis