In Partial Disgrace (21 page)

We played hide-and-seek in the papyrus thickets of the marshes, shouting to each other, “A whistle or cry, or let the game die. Waterman,
Wodje Mze
, arise!” I crawled like a weasel through the reeds, and when I could smell him behind me, as strong as twice-fortified wine, I turned and threw a handful of mud into his face. But he was too quick for me. Blinded by his vertigo of elbows and knees, he tumbled me into the stumps and swamp water, pushing my head into the muck. It was all I could do to keep my nose above water, and behind me I could feel Charon’s throbbing phallus. I screamed a mortal scream, managed to free an arm, reached up and tore out a gout of hair, and then, encrusted with the tomb-leaves of semen, ran back to the house.

Certainly, I found this irritating and rather beside the point, but the same scenario would be repeated many times. It was neither erotic nor innocent. It meant nothing in itself, but it presaged much. Though I saw him infrequently, he was always there—I remembered him three times a day, and still do.

One day Mother took me aside upon my flustered return. “I see you have been experimenting,” she said cheerfully but with melancholy eyes. “Just remember that the wastebin is where experiments should end up, not
à la page
.” And only our lack of ready cash prevented my seriously deranged playmate from being sent away to school. “One day,” Father said with a shrug, “you will just have to collect yourself, take a step back, and knock him down.”

I came into the world to replace a dead child, a true sister, pretty, petite, flirtatious, and extremely well-behaved, who lived only a single hour. I do not know if she had a given name. The lintel door of the chapel in which she was buried is inscribed only, “Waterlily of the Mze.” I had strict orders never to play near it—its doors were always locked—so I was inevitably drawn to it like a magnet, and regularly stole away to gaze through the chapel keyhole. Inside, impressive stained-glass windows rose to a cupola hooding a small bell which was never rung. A wine-red banner hung across the sanctuary, on the steps of which was a cushion nestling a broken saber. Once I gained entry through a broken floorboard. In the altar, behind a spring-loaded door, I found a chalice, upon it engraved “The Cup of Sorrow.” Inside the chalice, wrapped in a silk handkerchief, were two perfectly cut stones, one red, one blue. I felt a great solidarity with this vanished playmate, and I knew no one would ever build such a monument to me.

Her chapel (the last gothic church in the West) had been constructed from the ruins of a watchtower upon a promontory, its bowsprit terrace providing perfect views up and down the Mze. Owls nested in the gables by day and eagles by night, a silent changing of the guard accompanied only by Waterlily’s incessant singing; like me, she sang well before she could speak, throughout the night. She had our mother’s voice; her
forzas
were like a car hitting a wall, and eventually she mastered even the most difficult Astingi song-cycles, which, tighter than a sestina, go on in the same excruciating fashion—absence, devastation, return, retribution, wedding, absence,
et alia
,
alia
, among them
Rage Over a Lost Penny; I Am Not Scheherazade; If I Lay Down for You, It Is God’s Wish
;
It Doesn’t Become You When You Speak
;
He Who Doesn’t Kiss Her Deserves to Have His Tongue Torn Out
; or that showstopper, the eighteenth-century magisterial masterpiece,
The New God
:

When I returned to her, on Easter or other holidays when the family was otherwise preoccupied, I would open the altarpiece and, taking the stones from the chalice, shake them in my hand like dice—and when I was feeling most like the last son of an inglorious age, she would sing sweetly in the chapel, “So what are you alive for?”

In those stolen moments in the chapel of my dead sister, it occurred to me what my problem was. I had an
âme féminine
, a feminine soul. My thick heroic blood had somehow become feminine, upper class, and barbaric, negating modern culture, which makes the feminine masculine, democratic, and artificial. Civilization clung to me like rags. So while playing the man, I have always felt like a princess, a dead princess about to awake and make mincemeat of certain people, and as such I have incurred the fear and hatred of men, particularly if they were important personages.

My feminine soul was thus always in search of my body, mourning the disappearance of the old kind of artistic male who has died out; a virgin body being serviced by a non-virgin heart. I was a good little boy but a bad little girl, a winning combination. To preserve the appearance of manliness I would eventually take refuge in alcoholic stupor, from which I emerged a drunken and diseased victor, while retaining the eternal priority which was the delight of my feminine soul. I was one of the dead with whom the living have to reckon, a
salon bandit
, a bathhouse nymph, who would put in jeopardy men’s calm, their faith, and what’s more, their cynicism; female preference always modifying male domination. Oh, I may have been a born imitation, but one so hungry that I could gobble up any ten originals for breakfast. And in Cannonia, where everyone is based on someone else, Waterlily remained my favorite playmate, even more than Waterman.

The Esteemed Traveler may have noticed that known artistes often resort to introducing just such little choruses of chromatic chums who are mostly empty canvas, whose sidereal appearance illuminates a larger theme, amplifies a point, or assists in pulling through a packthread of some secret motive. But truth be told, there are no minor characters in Cannonia; everyone gets their aria as well as their comeuppance. And in my experience, it is best to keep such folk on the same page, because if they begin to wander aimlessly, like electrons or deviations from a tonic chord, nothing good can come of it. There is nothing more dangerous than a person who wants to become a character in a novel. So when one of these little black keys is sounded, never put the other two out of mind. Their tempos are set well beyond our egos, and if they do not strictly belong to a given key, each character constructs its own society. Whether embracing, confronting, echoing, fracturing, or inverting one another, they are simultaneously
all
melody and
all
accompaniment, and as such are difficult to kick out of the composition.

And what’s most interesting about such people is not the freshness of their entrances, but how, one by one, they disappear.

CHANGING THE SUBJECT

(Iulus)

From his tower suite, Father saw the rented trap careen up the drive and come to a skidding stop, leaving deep, muddy ruts in the oval lawn. Mother had picked up the hysterical pounding of the
troika
miles before and was already on the terrace to greet the stooped and trembling Professor, whom she perfunctorily embraced as she flung a helpless glance toward Father’s window. As they passed in the servants’ stairwell, she told Felix of the tragedy, adding, “Get his mind off it, but don’t even let him near our dogs!” When Felix found the Professor wandering absently in the entry hall, he commiserated with his double loss, took the suitcase from his hand, and dragged him down the cellar stairs beneath the stables, where he poured him a glass of his rarest wine, a priceless triple-pressing siphoned from a small, cobwebbed barrel tucked under his arm.

“It’s thirty years since I’ve tried this,” he said as softly as he would to a bride, and the mellow liquid topaz dissolved every grain of stubbornness and despair. The vintage issued from a pebbly ridge which produced four barrels a year of Charbah Negra, the most fickle and misunderstood of the great reds, a tart, cloudy, whimsical wine, with a burnt foretaste of iodine, and after a swallow, a scent of rose.

“Well, other bonds were stronger,” Father continued, after the despairing Professor had confessed his latest defeat. “Wolf is no great loss. He was not much, after all. Why can’t we just say, He forgot you, so you forget him!”

They drank long draughts of the sweet, apricot-colored essence, and heard the horses tremble the rafters overhead.

“They grieve with you, my dear friend, they tramp from the injustice of it all.”

My father’s interest in horses had waned since his youth, as he came to appreciate basic transportation over the expense of crazed beauties, and following the principle that a piano must strive to imitate the singing voice and vice versa, he began to search for a breed of horse whose temperament most resembled the dog’s. It was not long afterward that, while searching in a northern tier of counties where Grandfather Priam had hunted specimen shrubs, he located on the estate of a distant eccentric cousin of Count Zich descendants of the pure Pryzalawski tarpon horse, which in its migration with the Astingi had turned right at the Dukla Pass and kept its merriment and strength in the cold and desolate north, while the rest of the species herded blindly for the Arab Mediterranean to become romantic, slenderankled hysterics, fit for nothing except the mafia and girls’ scrapbooks. These northern animals could both haul and canter, take the family to church and plough, and between jobs negotiate the sharpest ridges at a brisk
tolta
, smooth as butter with a lonely rider lost in thought. They required no maintenance whatsoever, disdaining both the stable and the feed trough, and stood out in the fiercest blizzards in their shaggy golden coats, pawing through the snow for lichen. What they lacked in beauty—at times they appeared like enormous ponies, all neck, chest, and bulging joints, not well made at all—they more than made up for with stamina. I never saw one stumble, even when it was starving. Needing neither grooming nor shodding, they rolled in the pastures like great thunderclouds to burnish their coats, swam regularly in the strongest currents of the Mze, and trimmed their hooves by clog dancing along rocky escarpments. Only late in life did I realize that as the weather cooled and their coats grew shaggy, they appeared in the distance the exact color and texture of my mother’s pudenda.

Their only fault was proneness to obesity in lush pastures, and loneliness when not quartered with those of their own kind and disposition. They were sociable to an amazing extent, leaning upon one another in concert and pulling burrs from each other’s coarse manes with their teeth. They would carry a cringing child, a litter of kittens, or the most dyspeptic woman, and immediately know the difference. They refused, in a sense, to be kept, yet flight was unknown to them. Too good to be true, they would only run
toward you
. When the Chetvorah barked and lunged at them, they simply waited until the pack got too close, then sent them tumbling with their noses. The Astingi refused to sell even a one. They kept their older mounts long past service, in separate mountain pastures, where they often lived to the half-century mark. And when they died they were buried where they fell, in slightly convex mounds which mirrored the arch of their necks, memorialized with the sharp stones they had always avoided. Not surprisingly, in Cannonia (where it is rightly said that nothing can be done without a count) it was only through the intervention of Moritz Zich that we were able to acquire a brace and allowed to breed. I believe it was their blond presence in the fields about Semper Vero which prevented the Astingi from massacring us when the world turned over.

The drink had had no effect on the Professor’s despondency, though a new map of veins appeared on his nose, and Father led him up the cellar stairs, saying only, “Let me show you something.” There a stallion the color of clotted cream, with a black dorsal stripe, stood in the half-lit stall, a full wagon harness slung like a great indecipherable web upon him. The horse regarded my father calmly as always, for he was as sweet as he was strong. Father only had to reach out and touch the harness for Moccus to shiver with what was clearly delight.

“You see how much he loves it?” Felix said. “Fifty-three years old and still a stud! He loves to haul—the more the better. It’s his freedom, you see. His calling, one might say.” Then he placed the Professor’s hand on Moccus’s flank and the horse began to haul in the stall, as if exercising the concept of burden. His enormous weight creaked the timbers of the stable, and we all took up the shiver of delight.

“Feel it?” Father said. “He’s giving it back to you. Just as with Wolf. Except with Wolf, it was all anger and affectation.”

The Professor’s mind was now on display. I could feel the intellectual machinery encountering the unprovable, converting it into an idea he could grasp.

“It’s bred in him, I suppose,” he said skeptically, “but I’ve never trusted horses.”

Father stared at him. “Some were born to pull at the traces, of course. But the only question is this: what is the message you are sending
him
? Your touch is quite tentative, and yet he is encouraged!”

“
You
are saying that I am communicating my skepticism, but
I
say I cannot help it.”

“Of course, my friend. We ought to encourage skepticism. But there is a huge difference between skepticism and distrust. Intellectuals hardly ever know the difference, in my experience.”

“Yes, yes,” the Professor murmured in a series of rapid shrugs, as if to deflect the argument like a whirring peach moth. “We always forget the ancient brain.”

My father started as if he had been whipped, then broke into that long, low laugh of his.

“Surely,” he sputtered, “surely you do not place full faith”—he was choking with mirth at this point—“with the poet of the Galapagos?”

The Professor blanched as if from a wound.

“It’s the most convincing explanation we have.”

“Balderdash. Only the latest propaganda which everyone parrots and no one reads. The paraphrase, Herr Doktor, enforced in school by drones. Ah, yes, I can recall it now: the mural of the ape as he gradually draws himself erect, losing a bit of hair at each stage of his receding slump, the illusion of progress. A schoolboy’s fantasy, Doctor. So reassuring. Well, it’s as crude as the cartoons of the Kaiser with blood on his hands. Is that what gets you promoted at university these days?”

The Professor did not reply, and Felix could see that he had unwittingly touched a sore spot. He could flush out an unreflective premise like a good dog tracks a wounded bird, and then, while deciding whether the poor, maimed thing deserves a point, look back over his shoulder apologetically.

“I mean, it’s all well and good to say we got it from our ancestors,” Father continued softly, “but then where did our ancestors get it? How did the crocodile acquire a vagina? Survival is easy enough to explain. But how do you explain the
arrival
of the fittest, eh? There is simply no reason at all why we should exist as a species!”

“Hold on there,” the Professor stammered, as if to change the subject. “Does he not appear to be crying?”

And it was true: several large globules, shining like crystal, were making their way down Moccus’s golden nose.

“Yes,” Father sighed. “Their only fault. They weep constantly.”

“But why on earth? They appear to be kept perfectly. What a life, I should say!”

“The golden age of the animals was just beginning when there were no carts to pull, my friend. The horse, like the nomad peoples, has suffered terribly at man’s hands. What we have put them through! War was a positive relief. It’s amazing they can stand still even for a moment. Evasion was the only weapon they had, and they were always put in the service of the most reactionary class. The dog, by comparison, got off easy, like the West. Which is why for the dog all Asia remains an enemy. The dog remains dumbfounded that the horse, with his history, can maintain his spirit. The horse evades, the dog denies. This is their armory. And the horse weeps, not for Achilles, but because of what we have done to
him
.”

The Professor himself now seemed about to burst into tears.

“The horse is now only an icon,” Father went on softly, “standing for the remains of what you call our ‘ancient brain.’ But the dog, you see, stands for what was forever lost. All creation and all behavior can be divided among them.”

“Which is why we chose them to accompany us?” the Professor interrupted.

“Oh, surely you do not believe that canard about our civilizing these poor animals! That we used them to extend our senses, haul our baggage, and brilliantly inspire their trust and devotion? No, sir! They came to us quite willingly, out of the wind and rain, as nations go to any murderer if he is able to restore order for a moment. As for the doggie, did we meet as predators? Hardly, my friend. No, we are scavengers. We met across a rotting corpse which neither of us could kill. We are fellow swarmers, social animals, higher maggots, carcass chasers, keeping up with the migrating herds with the energetic inefficiency of our gait. It’s the scraps our friendship lives off; leftovers, marrowbones, and braincases are what make us loyal. They followed us because our
merdes
ensured their survival. And now we walk behind them and retrieve their feces with our own hands. I have yet to meet a woman for whom I’d do that.”

“Oh, Councilor,” the Professor wheezed as he bent double, “I never thought I would laugh again,” but Father continued utterly deadpan.

“The horsie, now that’s a different story. He knew we and our golden garbage were their only chance for survival, and indeed, that we had perfected their strategies, for no one runs away any better than man. They came to us because as mammals, they recognized both our promiscuity and the horrible length of time it takes to raise the young. Drama, don’t you see? Also, they liked the way we moved
en masse
. Entertainment! So they became our dependents, and like anyone who throws himself on your mercy, you will eventually let him down. Do you realize, Doktor, that by the
doghaus
’s own figures, eighty-five per cent of dogs are resold or given back in their first year? And do you know how many times a horse will change hands in his lifetime, or at what age they are sent to the slaughterhouse for dog food? No, the horse tolerates man because he knows there will always be a greater fool among them who will initially lavish him with love; and the dog tolerates horses because he knows that eventually he will eat them, though not the other way around. They come to us because it is we who decides who eats whom. My Lord, don’t you see? They were the only beings in the world we didn’t hate or fear, the only thing we didn’t immediately feel like killing. And while our vast sentimentality shortens our own lives, it prolongs theirs. Not exactly a Faustian bargain on their part, eh?”

“And which of them do we most resemble?” the Professor queried, now trying to get in the spirit of things.

“Ah, men are more like the horse than anything else. But they sing the lay of the dog.”

“And what might that be?” the Professor sighed like a little boy.

“It goes like this: ‘More life, please. Some mercy, too. Then more life.’”

“Your habit of explaining humans by animal neurosis makes me quite nervous, as you must know by now, Councilor.”

“Think of it this way, Professor: take horses and dogs, take men and women. Origins, values, ends: all different. Think of men and women as horses and dogs who happen to fornicate with one another. Not entirely incompatible or improbable, and looking quite swell when racing together at full stride through a green field. But basically about as much alike as horses and dogs. Now, there I will desist.”

The Professor gave him a sudden, inexplicable, and silent hug. “Wolf is history, my friend,” Felix said evenly. “Believe me, we can do better.”