In Partial Disgrace (41 page)

The Professor continued listening courteously, with a quizzical look on his face.

“But look!” Father exclaimed. “In the last millennium before the nailed-up corpse shows up, look.”

The pointer flashed to the passes of the Unnamed Mountains, down the great angled rivers and tributaries renamed with every change of government, through the dissipated empires like moist blotting paper smoldering and blackened at the edges.

“Tribes pushed by even more shadowy tribes, falling upon and absorbing other tribes. Nothing but an avalanche of mineral dialects and honest disbelief informs their armies, changing their names each time they cross a river. Bowl-faced and hatchet-faced, long heads and round heads, dark and fair. Once across the river they begin to undress, shed their sodden clothing and leather armor, and take their trousers off. Brandishing their javelins, painted blue with a paste of cedar and cypress, long penises tied up around their waists, not as a show of masculinity but on the contrary, to remind their foes of their own swinging soft vulnerability, the oddness and fragility of that member, the only thing in nature which is beautiful when wrinkled, that moiety which they cut off and stuffed in the corpses’ mouths, as that odd sarmentum which once produced a scream of pleasure now stoppled one of fear! There was panic in the outposts. Livius speaks of the barbarians moving across the landscape like dancers, their muffled vowels and harsh dactyls piercing through the spruce and poplar, so that frozen lakes with black holes became burned pastures. And what do the Romans make of them? Herr Marcus’s
stupor mundi:
‘Men murder and die of remorse. They never get back home. The privileged seem to fail at crucial times.’ He retires once again to the dark tent of his nocturnal to ask, ‘What is evil?’ And there under the heading, ‘To Himself,’ he begins those self-sodomizing speculations on why we are here. It’s not success in ventures that counts, he concludes, but the moral attitude with which they are undertaken. Phui! In the forest,” he whispered hoarsely, “in the reed-beds, our people wait for the hour to strike. And we wait with the superior knowledge that everything is going to vanish!”

Suddenly the pointer twitched all over the map from the Jutland Peninsula and southern Sweden to the Bay of Kent, swiping across Gaul to the Pyrenees, and then with a flash across Spain and the Mediterranean Sea, on to Carthage and Sicily.

“All this in a single generation! An undeveloped, swinish people? A rude, forest hatchet people who had somehow acquired a naval fleet? Well, there you have it! Thus speaks the stone.”

Father’s shirt was soaked with sweat.

“But surely there was a motive, an idea,” the Professor calmly interjected, “a dream, a fantasy, a belief that welded such disparate folk?”

Father cut him short. “Nothing of the sort. Ideas have their origin in explaining to your family why you have to move again. They simply took aim at the only coherent target, those peacock strutters on their pathetic walls, wrapped in their pastel winding sheets affixed with unattractive brooches.”

The Professor paused with infinite sarcasm. “Every dog will have its day, I suppose. And yet,” he continued more softly, “there were ancient wonders.”

“Ah, the old German dreaming of the sunken empire,” Felix rasped.

“No,” the Professor protested gently. “I was thinking of the Egyptians.”

“Fifteen centuries to determine that the dog is more venerable than the cat? A plodding people.”

“You are too hard on Aurelius,” the Professor went on, adopting a plaintive tone. “Have you no pity for one who prayed and worried for his men, who in turn only wished him gone? He was not superstitious; he was lenient. He was . . . a gentleman.”

“He was only the first of men,” Father huffed, “who would force us to be intellectuals and take away our pastimes and pleasures!”

The Professor had spat out the marble, and it lay on the table in a small glistening pool of saliva. Father took no notice. He was scribbling down what he just said
in furiant.
And then I realized that this harangue was not rehearsed or calculated at all, but a desperate attempt, through the pretext of a debate, to recover the lost pages of his manuscript, not unlike Gubik deciphering his narratives from his mute mother’s sign language. Thus ended my aristocratic education. I had learned everything I needed to know for my career. For life with friends and lovers is essentially this: that we assist each other in recovering and rewriting the book which is always blowing away, when the words don’t mean what you say. If one is attentive to this in another, you may be idealized or hated, but you will never have to spy. If you are unlucky enough not to find such an accomplice, or sufficiently torpid to refuse to be one, we go to war. We go to war not only to save face, but because we are deliriously happy and relieved to set aside the incredibly demanding project of rewriting the lost book which is always being written. In our hyperacute consciousness we will seek the help of the barbarian, will urge him to come and deliver us from our final agony of revision, and burn the bloody library. Only Count Zich, it seems, was aware that we were in such a moment.

The Professor, putting his feet upon the table, resorted to the one name which he knew would get a response.

“I believe you neglected the bourgeois part of the story,” he said without a trace of conviction.

This slight remonstrance indeed gave Father second wind, allowing him to play his trump, literally, and the dogs and I shuddered as he approached the huge instrument which took up the end of the library, half-tank, half-lyre. He saw that he had the Professor half-persuaded, and knew that to bring the old dog finally around, to fix the new trick in the netherfolds of his cortex, he would have to demonstrate that his own diagnostic powers were yoked to compassion—this by reinforcing his subject’s
weakest
sense, in this case, the Professor’s lack of an ear, his natural tone deafness, worsened no doubt by years of fake listening. He managed one of those compact turns, spinning on his boot heel, always the prelude to putting his nose through the facts, and with this he seated himself at the instrument of black Cannonian pine, nine feet tall, built as a right pyramid, with a single unblinking Masonic eye carved at the garlanded apex, the keyboards held up by twin little negroid figures, one carrying bells and the other a sort of drum.

His little finger rose and struck a single note—
boing, boink
—and the Professor’s face lifted up as if an invisible training whistle had sounded.

“
This
is what Marcus heard, Professor, beyond the voices and the taunts:
boink.
This is when he knew there was some magic boisterousness going on in those transalpine bastions which had to be constrained.
Boink
came the monotone, a note with his name on it, floating across the misty swamps and reedy islands of our melancholy region, the sound of reality, Professor, which Marcus mistook for the sound of attack.”

Father’s hands rose up to strike a chord from the huge furnace.

“Most prized of all, Professor, our people had in their wagons a rude wooden box or gourd across which was stretched a single string. Crude by Marcus’s melodious standards, perhaps, but let us never forget what stupefaction must have resulted from several millennia of the harp, relieved only by an occasional blast of the royal guards’ marine trombones—much less their callow attempts at choral harmony, which could be nearly pleasing only if chanted very slowly and with the utmost gravity. Against this officious flatulence, our tribes advanced with their crude dulcimers, their monochords, holding in their heads certain passages, something in E-flat perhaps, without a slightest notion of how they might be performed. But they knew one thing, which had not occurred to the routinized wizards of Rome, a discovery equivalent to fire and undoubtedly just as inadvertent . . . That great day when a javelin toppled over upon a gourd, and our predecessors realized that a note might be struck as well as plucked, plonked and plinked as well as bowed and swiped, smited more than strummed, iron on the wire of history . . . Yes, Professor, our people, the percussionists! Strike the string and turn Marcus white sitting in his dark tent. Watch carefully as those clear-eyed, clean toga’d men with their souls floating like little balloons above their head, will turn . . . When from across the Mze they heard the first modern sound—
boing
—throwing fear into the slender ghostly voices of the homogeneous lyre, calling into question all constitutional guarantees, natural rights, and the niceties of law—
boing
! And as they advanced, they learned quickly through victorious campaign after campaign, and not a few strategic retreats, that the other hand on the string might alter the tones. Wielding the spear through the Cannonian countryside, it was above Razacanum as forty-three churches were consumed in flames, that it was first announced that the thumb was no longer an apologetic pivot, a subordinate, but equal to the other four fingers, and there assumed a lead over the other fingers it would never relinquish. By expert force, we could diminish the sound, hold the note, fictitiously enlarge the span of the hand, while you went on with the next area of business. All great musical cultures are military, Professor, and as the great Robert E. Lee once said, ‘You can’t have an army without music.’”

Father raised his hands once again, though he had not yet struck a chord.

As Father detailed the wholesome reforms of our Astingi predecessors, admittedly transmitted forcibly for a time, I could not but reflect on their long march to the true imperium of the piano, and the brief time of my youth when all experience, technical and emotional, had been transcribed for it.

The original instrument in question had been purchased from a Turkish pasha by my grandfather Priam as a focal point for his sad, overstuffed furniture, which had nothing to do but face the fire. It served for a brief time as the national instrument of Cannonia, constructed as it was into two small pianos severed from their keyboards, so that they might be slung over donkeys and transported to concerts in the mountains. They were strung so they could be played inside with sticks by peasants, or outside if connected with the keyboard for those whose brain hemispheres happened to work together. Eventually the two halves were wedded with an innovative iron frame which insured consistently unequal tension, allowing the instrument, by separating wood from metal, to come as close as possible to the timbre of the singing voice, the illusion of the vocal.

By the time Grandfather had finished with his tinkering, the instrument was two pianos in a single case, coupled together by a lever, one tuned an octave above the other, for four-hand music for those without a partner, once again increasing one’s fictitious reach. The evolution of the instrument had followed the revolutions of the arms industry in the border fortifications, for Priam’s theory was that if you couldn’t have a battleship or a locomotive, you could have a piano and make your women play it. Grandmother Eriphyle had perused it in the half-hour before retiring, but as she refused to allow him to smoke while she played, he refused to attend her concerts. And so it sat for a year or so in complete desuetude, and while Grandfather never played a note, he carefully polished it, purchasing by mail order from Breslau a cushioned, inclined stool in black walnut, a telescopic lamp in bronze, and an automatic music desk to store the sheets. From Dresden he procured an obsidian finger-guard and pocket hand exerciser, as well as a correspondence course on how to play, to which he devoted the remainder of his life. He progressed rapidly in his music-reading ability, specializing in pieces which were impossible to play with two hands alone. But when he reached a certain level of proficiency, he noted that as hard as he struck the keys, there remained a certain dynamic inflexibility, and when he tried to sneak from one key to the next with the same finger, the notes disappeared abruptly like a stone in mud. When he smote the keyboard with a balled fist, the sound was delightfully smooth, but without vitality, and the damping pedal only increased the ghostliness of the tone. He found that he could string the chords together only with a kind of pointless ornamentation of each phrase. Arabesques, which he loved in wallpaper and dressing gowns for reasons he did not wish to explore, he loathed in melody. He had the curious unpleasant feeling that something was acting as an unnatural check upon his tone. And so he wrote straightaway to Württemberg for a steam-activated, hydraulic booster mechanism, a large and beautifully crafted copper dome called the
wohltemperer
, which connected the keyboard to the coal furnace, and when properly stoked by a servant, filled the house to the turrets with the organlike resonance of a hearty baritone voice. Thereafter, the same firm supplied him with a gearbox, designed from a secret alloy which allowed him to tighten the strings equally and test the tension of even the iron frame. And in a specialist magazine he came across a third pedal, the
spiccato
, for forty Louis d’or
.
“Low as a bassoon yet high as a flute,” it advertised, which allowed him to pass from major to minor without modulation, and disguised his weak left hand, which tended to lope after his right like a wounded deer. Then, successively, from the same company he added a fourth pedal, a
chordata
, which somehow strew a silk curtain upon the strings, and a year later a fifth offering arrived unsolicited by express post, a
pedal d’expression
, which sustained any chord and virtually redefined the notion of forever. Finally, a
sixth
pedal for Janissary music was attached, the only accessory manufactured in his homeland, which added an accompaniment of triangle and drum at random intervals. He christened this endlessly modified
attroupement
the “Archicemblelomachord,” and its renown gathered many prominent people and distinguished visitors to Semper Vero, including suitors for his daughter, as well as famous composer/virtuosos, who on their way to concert tours of Russia made a point to stop by and try out their repertoires of Kalkbrenner, Hummel, Herz, and Moscheles. (Mozart was then considered too old-fashioned, his piano music mere sketches for quartets, while Beethoven’s sonatas were ignored as monstrous abortions of German idealism.) These guests often admitted the instrument was superior to the piano, but they did not wish to learn their art over, much less rely upon a
klaviergeschichte
which was by now virtually impossible to transport.