In Partial Disgrace (22 page)
(Iulus)
Their friendship had taken on the solidarity of those you grow up with, when there are no secrets. Tiring of alluding to the other by their professions, but unable to move to a first-name basis, they took the nicknames my mother gave them—Scipio and Berganza—from an early Spanish play about two dogs who are always fighting, taking each other by the throat and flinging the other about, but nevertheless inseparable. Wandering astray through the countryside, they occupied themselves chiefly in playing pranks on their unfortunate fellows, chained to a post or locked in their kennels, “always hunting, but unstained with gore.”
They used these affectionate nicknames only when making the most serious of points, clinching an argument, or utterly destroying the other’s most cherished beliefs, though it must be said that Father on his own territory got the better of these, a victory he would one day pay for. The Professor, to his credit, was never afraid of being helpless or at a loss for words in my father’s presence; nor was my father fearful of challenging everything he said, even down to his reading of the weather. It was refreshing for Father to be in the presence of a personality which could not be easily intimidated. They could never let on to their families how much difficulty they were in, and were delighted to find in each other a use for the paternal melancholy they used to batter every convention. They never returned from their training sessions in the fields without boyish catches in the throat, indicating that you consider your best friend insane, but refuse on principle to call the fact to the world’s attention. You could see it glistening on their faces, whether the dogs did well or not, the sense that underneath everything,
they
had behaved perfectly.
Whenever the Professor arrived, as soon as the requisite papers had been destroyed, he and Father would move off in the victoria with the best trotters and dogs. Occasionally I would stay with Mother; however, on most occasions, I was invited to accompany them on their “rambles,” a word my father abhorred as it implied a chatty English excursion in a fine rain to an unremarkable prospect, a kind of contrived masochism which could only be palliated by a formal dinner beneath a tent with servants in the evening. The Professor would remove his hat, allowing the sun to color his face while he complained of long hours, the unbelievable stupidity of his patients, and the general ingratitude of the world. Everyone needs one friend with whom he can be totally sarcastic and bitter, and Father was aware that his was always in some kind of severe physical discomfort.
“I am not what I was,” he would conclude, and Father would pop the reins, jerking back his confrere’s large pale head in rather too obvious a therapy, for my father’s belief was that no one saw anything clearly—that you were not even in this world—unless your heart’s systole was over 160. Thus he would alternate jupes, jogs, harsh trots, and thundering canters until the Professor acknowledged that he could feel bubbles of energy rising from his pelvis to his ailing heart, better than any digitalis at making the brain pink again.
Here my memory falters, as it will when the subject is the falling out of fast friends, for friendship is a steady state in which all theories are held in abeyance, and the after-the-fact is never envisioned. For my father, the Professor was the childhood sidekick he never had, and in return he brought out both the adventurer and the keen observer in the Professor, so locked in the mire of family, city, and profession. Father brought him back into the world, and more than once when they were standing in the fields he quoted the great Goethe to him in the vernacular: “Quit squinting at the heavens, man. Stand firm and look around you!”
Father also understood his boon companion enough to know this was a man who would find what he was looking for, despite all odds and contradictions, and their friendship depended on him, their forays appearing wholly spontaneous. The Professor’s fascination with my father was that he could not but admire a man who loved his culture, meager as it was, and pressed it to his breast, extracting from his environment every ounce of reinforcement, like a cellist who practices all day and receives so much feedback that he rarely feels the impulse to perform, and lives easily to one hundred.
Only one thing didn’t quite reach Papa’s rich and benevolent skepticism, and that was in noticing that our region, which had sprung up where a dozen tongues and civilizations had clashed, had been created out of the wind and would disappear into it. Our culture, if one could call it that, was not like a horse, which you could pick up positively with your will and put right down again at the front of the race. He spent his life amazed that the Enlightenment his family had brought to the frontier did not take root anywhere, that in Cannonia rights and obligations never moved together.
While he was fully prepared to be the last of his kind, and I suppose took pleasure from it, the rankling question of the breeder still remained. Without rigid controls nothing gets passed on, yet to break the deadlock of mediocrity required something of a revolution. These questions were uppermost in his banter with the Professor about religion, which was something of a soft spot, as you might expect.
“You’re no Jew, Berganza,” he often giggled, “just a Calvinist with a sense of irony.” Add to that his derision of all things German in the clearest and the most precise
Hochdeutsch
, his love of tradition and contemptuous dismissal of it in the same breath, as well as his distinctly Protestant contribution to Jewish advice—that there is no such thing as a symbol, that depth is just as illusory as surface, that you can make more money selling advice than following it.
Of course, I took my cues from the dogs, for when danger threatens, dogs run away without apology. I had no theory, I didn’t question motives, I made my shifting alliances as best I could. Consistent in my friendliness and friendlessness, I didn’t differentiate. I went to those who were kindest to me, who fed me. I would form new bonds but I was always looking for a better master, so I tended to like everyone.
Eventually the day came when Father’s savage debates with the Professor became subsumed not by discretion, friendship, or even exhaustion, but by having generated such wild analogies that they might as well have been speaking in tongues—though they showed no embarrassment at Mother’s yawning or my own, or at the fact that people moved away from them in pubs.
On one subject they were agreed, that it is in one’s own class that the traitor conceals himself. The lesser nobility’s natural enemy is the nobility, the wealthy, the state from which they extract their privileges. The peasants’ bane is their own kulaks; the bourgeoisie fears only its own petit bourgeoisie, the gentry, its own bailiff. It is one’s truest self, in other words, the self you have just shed, or the one you aspire to, the soul slightly removed and granted a temporary advantage, who thunders down the pass dressed in party clothes and takes no prisoners. This is the sad story of men who do not make their antecedents clear. And one day while the two of them were riding on the American steam tractor, the Professor straddling the hood and facing Father at the wheel, they agreed that the only interesting philosophical question left was whether it was possible to pass on what one had acquired.
The Professor was obsessed with the fact that human self-consciousness was different from anything else that previously existed, and he admired the dog because his purposiveness was less complicated—he did not spend his days watching himself and doing nothing. Having learned to be actively passive, the dog did not waste time stressing the difference between himself and everything that had gone on before.
Father knew this to be the response of one raised without pets. Against the Professor’s romanticism of the dog and its infelicities, Father had projected his own theory of the mind, based on observation.
“Did you know,” Scipio, the Professor had said proudly one day, prying open Wolf’s jaws, “that there are less bacteria in this lout’s mouth than ours?”
Father did know, but he knew something else as well. He knew it most when the Professor discoursed upon the center of the brain, its hidden problems and purposes, a space in which everything important in the world was essentially left unexplained. He knew it from dogs who had been eviscerated, died on him, or been split open by a bear, and it was this: at the center of the brain lies not a knot of history or chemistry, but an empty cavern, and none the less mysterious for that. In this echoing sinus, laced with veins and covered by the dome of the hippocampus, there exists no idea or thought, only emotional energies which eventually find their way into thought to be filed under “Useless Suffering.” The dog retains two arteries from the nose directly into this cavity, men do not, which is why our first reflex is to deny reality and complicate associations. The female of our species does not use her nose, or rather she uses it differently. Her nose is connected to her ear, while in men it is to the eye, a most savage degradation.
This was the basis of the friendship: the Professor couldn’t understand how Scipio, far more darkly pessimistic than he, could act so cheerfully and not project panic. And my father admired in Berganza the fact that he had developed an intellectual method to make up for his lack of nose, his poor judge of character.
Both may have underestimated me. For the dog gets our admiration because he is sniffing every moment of the day and does not confuse devotion with romance, which is why he is always emergent. His senses are attuned to snuffing out evidence of betrayal, and he transforms his deep cynicism into requests for constant attention. The dog is the only true detective, just as he is the only survivor without guilt. Men never get over the fact that the mind seems superior to the experiences presented to it. This basic misconception arises not because their mind is superior but because their sense apparatus is fooled.
One day after an exhausting ramble they returned to Father’s den for some serious libation, and while Father was pouring single-malt whiskeys, the Professor snuck up behind him and slipped the collar of Dresden rings about his neck.
“Easy, Scipio,” he said. “I won’t hurt you.”
Father didn’t move a muscle.
“You know there are few men whose society I can tolerate with equanimity, Berganza.” Handing a whisky to the Professor, the collar closing only slightly, he proceeded to unlock a vitrine and take an artifact from the glass shelves. “The Oriental snaffle bit,” he announced. “The swivel action allowed the barbarians to outmaneuver the Western centurions, and was the single most important accouterment in their success. Here, try it on.” As he went round behind him, the leash went slack. He slipped the bit between Berganza’s beard and mustache, holding the delicate reins of amaranthine leather above his head. As they wolfed down their Scotches Russian-style, the Professor’s jaw jutted out, and a light appeared in the black eyes as he dropped to all fours.
“Does it hurt?” Father inquired.
The Professor shook his head defiantly.
“It’s supposed to hurt a little. Observe then, this smallest pressure,” and Father pulled the bit slightly to the right, pulling back the Professor’s lips and exposing the slightly yellowed incisors.
“Very good, Berganza.” Then he pulled on the left rein, and the Professor’s mouth was drawn into a quite uncharacteristic but not unattractive grin. The Professor wrapped the end of the chain’s leash around his own neck, singing, “Let’s go, heigh-ho, mount up, Scipio!” and the Professor obligingly sauntered around the room with Father astride, careful to keep his weight on the balls of his feet, as his yolk-fellow gave him slack. And so they played around with each other as they would permit no other mortal, not even a woman. The library rang with their shouts, and soon damp splotches appeared in the armpits of their suit coats.
“You were born to pull at the traces, Berganza,” Father exclaimed.
“And you, dear Scipio, know just how hard to pull!”
But the Professor was soon winded, and they fell into a heap in the corner howling for joy like animals.
Father was fascinated by leaks. He spent his boyhood building dams of every conceivable material across every creek, rivulet, and runnel, observing how long and in what manner they eroded and unraveled. To him this seemed the basic principle on which nature and science had collaborated: the inevitability of life randomly breaking through its forms. He applied the principle to his breeding, respecting above all the genes which leaked—in error, wisdom, or divine plan was unimportant—while judging the desirability of the mutation, then determining how it might be fixed. The mind was not to be judged on the quality of the ideas it had, but on how it dealt with ideas broken down and dispersed—ideas which broke their own membrane, as it were. In short, where most men would have identified with the dam or the water, having faith in river gods or whoever watches over engineers, my father’s concern was with the banks of the stream. The nature of the problem, as opposed to the essence, could then be put in an entirely different light. If, as was often said in those days, man encounters an abyss, it behooved him to know its depth and general topography, and it should make a difference whether this declivity was chasm or pond, brook or gorge, mudflat or rushing torrent. The river’s origins in his high backyard, or the muddy and boring delta where it slithered into the sea, did not concern him. It was what to do with the damn thing as it crossed one’s property. If one could not ignore the river’s disruptive powers, one could at least manage change at an acceptable rate. In this as in most things, he was ahead of his time, as velocity was to become the primary subject of the century.
I mention this only to explain that Father’s den was largely a collection of leaks and holes, the artifacts of obdurate and inexplicable pressures. He thought of books as dams—marvels of engineering which nevertheless eroded at different rates as they aged. He had a preference not for those which stood the test of time, which he considered simply a matter of luck, but for those which self-destructed before they were finished. For what defined a book was not whether you read or wrote it, but the honest notice that just at the very moment as you were adding the last of its blockages, they were eroding as fast as they were built. In his library the catalogue was predictable: a section of history which expended all its energy in mastering secondary sources so as to never render judgment; philosophy with the glaring contradictions in logic; science based on untestable hypotheses; a series of collected fiction lacking an odd volume, which brought its market value to nil; several roped-off sections of “unreadable masterpieces,” novels written by cowards in heroic tone; poetry whose complete surrender to loftiness finally impoverished it. He specialized in collecting books that neither petered out nor went awry, being fundamentally misconceived from the start. There was also a collection of
incunabulae
whose value was the precise inverse of their contents, books which appreciated to the exact extent they could no longer be read, or had became too valuable to read. The only complete set in the library was Cardinal de Baussets’s
Histoire de Fénelon
. His favorite book, he often said, was Volume Four, a tome whose pages had been carefully glued together, forming a solid rectangle which had then been hollowed out so that it could conceal a small dagger and some stamps.
