In Partial Disgrace (14 page)

“A most interesting way of putting the case.” The Professor had decided to recuse himself from the debate, but you could see the admiration in his eyes. “And you are no slouch yourself, it seems, when it comes to ideas.”

“What you will learn here is that training is all impulse, energy, and tempo,” Mother added in her deepest registers. “The moment it becomes
pedagogy
”—she nearly spat this—”you are finished!” And she threw her napkin in the air.

“But surely the commands are of the utmost importance, if not the ideas, which you so summarily dismiss,” the Professor insisted with increasing determination.

Ainoha quickly took the lead as Felix cut another joint:

“Another misapprehension, my good Doctor! The Astingi are the greatest animal handlers the world has ever known. But they have only three commands:
lassa
,
frieza
, and
panza
, delivered with thousands of different intonations. My dear Professor, believe me, throw any word into the world and you will find a thing for it. The trick lies in preparing the subject to receive the word!”

“Most education is one-third action and two-thirds explanation,” Father adumbrated. “It is inertial, continuing on vaguely and mechanically. For anything to be passed on, that ratio must be reversed. A thought, to have effect, must be ready to rectify its own trajectory, and to attach itself to the reality of what the animal is telling us.”

“Oh, Councilor,” the Professor laughed embarrassedly, “the next thing you will be telling me is that dogs can talk!”

“But my dear sir, the dog
can
talk,” Mother interjected sweetly. “No one with any knowledge would deny that. However, they only talk to themselves, just as a child learns to think silently before he speaks. This is not a vexing problem, and anything but esoteric. There is a whole area of experience which refers to things we would say if we wanted, but either we choose not to or we never get around to putting it into words. And who is to say whether our hearing is too refined or we are just deaf? I, for example, can distinguish the sound of a viola from that of a cello, but I wouldn’t know how to distinguish it in words. The dog’s knowledge could be articulated; it just happens not to be. Ultimately, the dog believes in civility, where everything is known and assimilated, provided it is not said openly. It is not kept secret for political or psychological reasons, as you seem to think.”

“This is madness!” the Professor snorted.

“No, Professor, in this matter my wife happens to be quite right for once. Recall Achilles’s chariot horse, Xanthus, who warned that a god would kill his driver, just as he had slain Patroclus. What did he get for his trouble, his prophesying? The Erinyes struck him dumb! No, we did not evolve; the animals simply stopped talking to us. There is something here much more interesting than language, Professor. It is the paralysis of speech. The dog always has a word on his lips, though he never utters it. Is this not the basis of our love and curiosity? One must learn to read the word which is caught short upon the lips. And should the animals start talking to us, as in olden days, watch out! If they speak, it means they have lost respect for us as their protectors, and insanity will reign!”

“Does it not strike you as odd that you insist so theoretically that everything we know is somehow tacit?” The Professor was reverting to his more sarcastic manner.

“Fine,” Father snapped. “If you want to make philosophy of it, make one. But please, let us not be caught up in a philosophy based only upon the mind and the eye. What would a philosophy be that was based only on the mind and the ear, or the mind and the nose? What begins as memory, terminates, Professor, as behavior is created. All we know is suddenly the dog learns, to everyone’s surprise, that a significant variation can be made upon the rules. Believe me, if you want to understand a working life, it cannot be studied scientifically, because we do not understand what we do until we have done it. Only the thing you thought you thought can teach you how to think.”

Refilling the Professor’s glass, Mother added with her most glowing smile, “Science, I think you’ll agree, doesn’t really matter in the end.”

Shaking his head like a horse avoiding a fly, the Professor slumped down in a long and disabused silence, as Öscar cleared the plates. He took note of his handsome, confident hosts at each end of the table with their
goyische
, self-satisfied grins and perfect manners. His depression had returned in full measure, and he raised his eyes and adjusted his pince-nez to avoid their open, friendly stare. Then, as the silence became interminable, his gaze suddenly widened with incredulity, and his lustrous brown eyes, so much larger than his glasses, turned all pupillary black.

He had been too distracted by the bright guns, the rare beef, and the dense conversation to notice that the main expanse of open wall, above the riflery vitrine and the evil little child, was dominated by an oil painting as large as the top of a grand piano. Out of a Rembrandtine black field he could make out a man in an even darker suit turning away from his desk laden with ancient books and skulls, turning from his studies in order to lift a white shroud clinging to the body of a beautiful woman lying on a pallet. His left hand held his bearded chin below blue-gray eyes, which were clearly in the process of having a thought that had not yet found its word. On his right hand, which rested above her exposed left breast, a wedding band glowed, more ancient and golden than the western light falling upon his high, domed forehead. His eyes were hooded in concentration, while on her face, behind the wires of lashes, the half-closed right eye was visible. In the upper right corner was a candlestick without a flame, and in the lower right one, a large moth at rest, its wings retracted about an illegible signature. There were many different whites—the off-white of the half-opened book pages, the enameled white of the skulls, the photographer’s white of the man’s cuffs and collar, the transparent white of the silk shroud, the ivory white of her breastbone, the pearl white of her face. It took no connoisseur to see that the visages bore an uncanny resemblance to his hosts. Thus commenced one of the longest silences in the history of our family, a veritable ice age.

“Might I inspect it more closely?” the Professor finally said, as a steaming, braided strudel put in an appearance.

“By all means,” Mother said, disappearing to return with a circular stepladder from the library. The Professor ascended it not too steadily, and I was instructed to hold his ankles.

“An amateur work, of course,” Father said absently, planting an enormous piece of strudel in the shape of a Greek cross on his absent guest’s plate, “but well-disciplined in the Cannonian school. Every few years he comes up with something interesting. What do you think?”

But the Professor could not answer. It was one of those works of art which makes its effect entirely apart from painterly worth or historical associations. It did not demand to know if it was good or not. And if it was a period piece, it was in no curriculum.

“Death and sexuality,” the Professor announced, “and rarely have I seen them in such cogent conjunction.”

There was no reply at first, only the huge knife clanging on the strudel plate, and Mother’s nails drumming on her napkin ring. Then she spoke:

“She isn’t dead, of course.”

“No?” the Professor said. “Then sleeping?”

“Neither dead nor sleeping,” Ainoha said distantly.

“But she’s so pale.”

“It’s the light, Professor. It’s, how do you say . . . a
device
.”

“Who knows what’s going through her mind?” Felix said gruffly, finishing his dessert with a single bite.

“And he, he is . . . experimenting with her,” the Professor whispered, “while she is
not
conscious.”

“How could one possibly know that?” Mother said sweetly. “How do we even know if he is a proper doctor?”

“Now, there it is,” the Professor fairly shouted. “He is a
meshugana
doctor, a fake doctor, taking advantage.”

“You have this habit, may I say,” Mother intoned evenly, “of insisting, whenever I question your observation, that my taking exception is simply an illustration which proves your point.”

“Doctor, she is right again,” Father said sententiously. “She is not in another world, nor this one. She is just, well, full of herself.”

“And our mad scientist who exposes her breastbone?” the Professor blurted, nearly falling from his perch.

“He is a bit overwhelmed, perhaps, but he is reverent,” replied Father. “Surely you can see that it is the observed who is in control here.”

“I see nothing of the sort,” the Professor blurted. “This is against all the rules.”

Mother’s voice assumed its deepest French horn sonority:

“My dear doctor, one always believes one has had more sex than one actually has, and this can confuse even your partner.”

“This is
after
sex,” announced the Professor.

“Really?” Mother mused. “Well, anything is possible. But I should say before—quite a bit before.” She was looking off into space, playing with her strudel as if it were a mouse. “Many guests have given us their interpretation, you know. No one ever fails to comment.”

“It’s quite amazing, you know,” Father broke in cheerily. “When you live with a picture, you never really look at it. Because you own it, it ceases to exist. Very strange.”

The Professor was trying to read the artist’s title above the moth. It was either
Der Anatom
or
Der Analom.

“Yes, the moth,” Father said embarrassedly. “Decidedly a false touch.”

“Might I ask which of your guests’ reactions was your favorite?” the Professor asked, now somewhat more detached as he descended the spiral stair, patted me on the head, and resumed his place.

“Oh, yes, it was a professor from Geneva, wasn’t it, dear?” Mother said. “His impression was that it was an up-to-date Dido and Aeneas. She has refused to die upon the pyre. And he has ignored the instructions of the gods to continue his journey, and instead will share their common fate. Very classy, no?”

“Such an idiot,” Father muttered. “He believed that art is something which happens between an accident and its criticism.”

“All very vague and sanctimonious, I must say,” said the Professor, a bit of strudel in his beard.

“And bourgeois?” Father twinkled.

“Even vagueness can be explicit if it’s explained well enough,” Mother allowed. “It was a wonderful evening. He threw himself in the pond.”

“What I like best about the picture is its smell,” Felix concluded. “It has the scent of a couch upon which one has just made love. Must be in the unvarnished pigments. Yes, whatever the story here, it is a scene quite on the verge of chemical collapse.”

“Artists are fantastically good at undermining themselves,” Mother shrugged, “and to be sure, Dido
was
something of a fool!”

MOTHERLAND

(Iulus)

It was well known throughout the countryside that Father had been the only man in modern times to have married a goddess, the only auslander to bed an Astingi since Attila. Accordingly, throughout his adult life, he was subjected to abnormal measures of both envy and sympathy by the ignorant—the only true education in which misconstruction makes the morning coffee.

It was true that Ainoha Aegle Apamea had all the contours and fury of the ideal, a famed beauty reflecting the original Astingi cross of the Viking with the Greek: golden-red hair upon olive skin, ocher eyes, a ruthless décolletage above the rose window of her navel, and below, um, her golden bee. When Mother smiled at you across a room, it opened every wound, and when her voice dropped into its lower registers, men would shake. She had all the devils of the world in her eyes, and hers was the cold laughter of the immortal, softened by an amused, enigmatic, and winsome grin. Father said he never saw anyone sleep so soundly, but when awake she never once blinked. She was a specialist in
purdeur
, presence, and the discretion necessary to true arousal. At times, Ainoha had a little trouble being human.

Technically speaking, Mother came from the moon: not that her dark side never showed, but often when you looked up, half of her was missing.

More often, she sat on a cloud far beyond the moon combing her hair, dropping her combings into the river, while sifting the mists through a silver sieve. She bathed three times on summer nights and nine times on autumn nights to make me a magician. I was her Fire Child.

The Moon Goddess is faithful, therefore insuperable, but she never lets you forget it. Not much of a hugger, she kissed me only once a day. But that was a privilege and at such times I felt justified in using the royal “we.” However, beauty has its own rhythms; beauty speeds things up and multiplies affect. My mother was made for many loves. Strong in all things, she should have had the strength to live alone.

Ainoha had been a child movie star in the Cannonian silent film industry, which had allowed her to overcome shyness, though she felt the cinema to be an infantile art form. She never once looked at the films made of her, and one could see why. No one
ever
looked like her, moved like her. She moved like water pours, like a self-excited comet; short hair on the head, long hair otherwise, all dry fire. She had the air of a bloodhorse and walked with a slight tilt, as if she were falling out of a foutée, and when she passed by, one sensed great oceans of air being moved. Like all her people she loved to smoke and loved to dance. Her ballgoing shoes had bells built into the heels, so when she walked she seemed to chime. She was of course a crack shot, as well as a champion swimmer, rider, and sprinter. When she picked up her skirts and remembered to remove her hat, she never lost a footrace. Not exactly a
femme fragile
or
horizontale,
trained in gymnastics and ballet, she could kill a man with a single blow of her leg. She trapped falcons, sewing up their eyelids to prevent them from predating, and trolled for pike with her earrings. She galloped after the county dogcatcher, and at point of sword, forced him to release his wretched captives and beg forgiveness. When on horseback on a hunting line there was no shaking her off, you could not ride wide of her. You never escaped her at a single fence. I shall never forget her voice, “Pray, take care of that gate!” And through brake and brier, over ditch and dike, surrounded by a profane drunken crowd of escorts, she permitted no reference to her safety, comfort, or success. And yet as impossible as it was to escape her, it was the same at every gate and gap. “Might I ask you,” she trilled in her pretty voice, head thrown back like an ecstatic maenad, “not to come too near me?” And when in a bad mood, one could often hear her kicking a soccer ball for hours and hours against the granary. She was, perhaps, the world expert on dog fibers and other useful fuzz, knitting many useful items from doghair—scarves, watchcaps, pullovers, and mittens for all of us, as well as full-length traveling jerkins for the dogs, belted across the stomach with a small flapped pocket for a train ticket. Her weaving pins were never far from her hands.

Mother was invariably late for meals, generally sleeping till noon in her darkened room behind heavy damask curtains and carved pillars which kept out both light and air. But she was no neurasthenic. She took to her bed aggressively and made the world her bed. It was from her I learned how to pull the coverlet taut and watch how all difference evaporates. After a hot bath which she took in a thick linen chemise (she could apparently wash without lifting it) she would darken her eyelids with the soot produced by holding a porcelain cup over the flame of a candle, and hurry into lunch absentmindedly, surrounded by an aroma of Turkish tobacco and Houbigant, carrying a bundle of old international newspapers in which she was well-versed. Then, after lunch, gathering up an untender beefsteak for supper and placing it beneath her saddle, she would take her daily horseback ride, jumping over the innumerable crisscrossed sheaves of hay in the south pasture, with its golden apple orchards.

But Mother also lived in that special hell reserved for beauteous women (for only the pretty demand to be valued for themselves) and like Francesca she was caught in a kind of unrhymed poem as well, which charged her monologues with melancholy; the goddess who is herself invulnerable but
chooses
to be kind, insisting on bestowing gifts even when they were not wanted. She encouraged others to subscribe to her dottiness, a readiness to retreat from the merciless laboratory of history into the blessings and total adulation of pets and family. “Have I missed anyone today?” she would often say into the uncritical love glow of cats and dogs, and during dinner, when Father and I were engaged in some inconsequential argument and looked to her to break the tie, she would fling down her napkin and exclaim, “Oh, you
word
people, there’s just no getting around you!”

Yes, she preferred beauty above all things, but she hated aestheticism. She loved literature but hated the literary. Like Beatrice, she did not profit from her lover’s immortal poems; indeed she was most absent when they were recited to her. Like many girls she resented the procedure of being the love-object exclusively; imagine the Dark Lady’s anger at Shakespeare after one hundred and twenty sonnets—“Oh for god’s sake, leave me alone!”—and you have a gauge of her impatience with her infatuates. Yet she loved men’s muscles, and their throbbing veins, which accounted for our enormous collection of idealized garden torsos. “They’re never the same as on statues,” she often sighed when walking among them, but she knew that the greater the man, the more aesthetically inferior his representation.

She also knew that beauty is a contest, no matter how much one denies it, and in the end the muse is mostly merciless, admitting to the lower slopes of Parnassus only the most palpable beings, while history groans with the hisses and moans of those whom they have rejected. Her counseling method was derived from Hypatia, who flung her menstrual cloth in the face of a student who was in love with her so that he might learn to love only immutable truths. With Mother, all exercises were useless unless done with the correct form, and the first order of business with men, as with dogs, was to breed the whining out. “To be good at anything,” she often said, “one must be a bit cold.”

How Ainoha became the Mistress of Semper Vero is one of those stories as definitive as it is open-ended. Priam’s marriage to Calliope Eriphyle, a woman of much neck but not much else, was barren, indeed barely civil; and Priam spent most of his time in the upcountry, hunting for rare Bonsai-type stunted evergreens on the Astingi plains of Crisulan. But one day upon his return from a month’s absence, there was seated in his break, along with a freshly dug cedar, windsculpted into the shape of a lyre, a gorgeous girl of nine with a basketful of adorable red-golden puppies. While obviously as proud of her as a cavalry charge, Priam never complained or explained, though his mustache had turned half-white. Calliope Eriphyle, for her part, was prepared to adopt a pragmatic solicitude, but the ethereal child showed no interest in her whatsoever, sitting upon the grass with her legs splayed carelessly about, tipping the litter basket over in her lap as one by one the dogs leapt up to kiss her, nip her, the largest male hanging for a moment from her earlobe. She had everyone’s attention, but at arm’s length, just the way she liked it. As the sun sank into the smoky, lilac-colored Mze, the child’s eyes turned green-orange, and seeing there a restless vivacity and a cynical boldness, as well as a shard of powerful melancholy skepticism, the wife was properly horrified and withdrew. As the dogs grew stranger than poets, they ran off into every corner of the house, each securing for itself a den which could be defended, reconvening only in the evenings when they bathed, gamboled, and danced like holy fools in the shallows of the Mze. The girl-child never asked for a thing, never spoke of her people or former home, but showed great interest in Priam’s ancestors, as well as the smallest details of running the estate. (The idea being that even if the past might not accept you, it didn’t mean that the past wasn’t yours.) She was, in fact, perfectly behaved, while exhibiting a healthy derision of every lofty conviction. She seemed to view humans as a remote if interesting species, well worth studying in some depth.

There were the usual rumors—that Priam had fathered her with a now disgraced Astingi maiden, that he had bought or kidnaped her, or more plausibly, that she was a gift from the Astingi Shaman to ingratiate themselves with the gentry, and to place a spy among us. Priam never bothered to refute any of the charges, and as the girl brought light and life into a house where theretofore no one had ever listened to music, read a book, climbed a mountain, looked at the sea, or been alone for a minute, no one really cared
how
she came to be there. She had arrived as had our ancestors from the East, on a cart drawn by buffaloes, and she learned her gait from geese.

When her preternatural teenage beauty captivated the
cineastes
, and cameras whirred and phosphorus flares ignited in every corner of the property, Priam seemed to think it was all some harmless ancient ritual, until he was shown an album of stills of his own family, as well as day laborers in their embroidered cloaks, and well-washed gypsies from the fringe of the village. These were the first photographs which he actually saw as photographs, which made everything flat, small, and quiet, and he realized immediately that his way of life was over and his class and character were doomed. Indeed, it was not long after that he disappeared from Semper Vero, and certainly I inherited his aversion, for if there is one thing I have always been utterly sure of it is that I am
not
a camera. And I have never permitted a photograph to be made of me.

Mother was not much interested in the attachment theorists. “To be the beloved is the only way you can learn anything about a man, though whether it’s worth it is another story,” she often said to me. What she loved in men was their simple bark of pure ambition, their getting down on all fours to howl at Rome. And in particular she loved Father’s selfishness without self-absorption, for it takes enormous courage to be happy. But she also knew that in the end, men have to be roped in to satisfy the demands of cruel conservative Nature and her strange imperatives. And with her nest of golden wires, no one was ever better at it.

What she was especially good at was
frisson
and
lèse majesté
. Her sense of nest spanned solar systems. One had the distinct impression from Ainoha that we were all going to live together forever, and I must say I could only admire this great intrusive female, always trying to civilize and sensitize my father and I, and always failing. Yet I was doomed to Mother’s revenge; her creaseless face and indomitable spirit would give me the bad habit of incessant rebirth. And if the muses are always pictured carrying something—a globe, a flute, a lyre, a mask, a scroll, a reversed torch—Ainoha could often be found walking alone with her tennis racket and a pensive look.

I could never discover the exact nature of her relationship to the Astingi, or where she actually stood in their pagan hierarchy, for they had very little contact owing to her marriage outside the tribe—and it is probably not in a goddess’s interest for things to be too clear or consistent. Her Astingi given name was
Tritogeneia
(“Thrice-born”), from changing her nature with the seasons. The Greeks imply that she was descended from Nyx, daughter of Chaos, mother of Sleep and Death, and feared even by Zeus. But the Astingi never had much of a taste for cosmogonical rhetoric, and one thing they knew for certain was that beauty was a real power, inseparable from terror, and nothing like a myth. The Astingi patrolled our property as if it were theirs, enforcing the poaching laws with swift and silent dispatch, leaving an unlit votive candle where a trespasser had been snuffed out. Ainoha was from the Naiad line, who presided over three thousand rivers roaring as they flow, and depending on your sources are capable of abrupt death by drowning or everlasting sexual bliss. But river goddesses have little or no mythology and disappear only when their rivers cease—so the only thing they fear is drought.

But it must have been frustrating to be goddess to a people who had no need of goddesses. Worship for the Astingi simply meant a silent gratitude that the higher powers walk among you, and the people you revere, you leave alone. They had no need for a leader, and thus were free in the only way that counts: free to worship her without expecting favors and without coveting her relative privilege. This respect was enforced by millennia of primogeniture, in which the eldest child inherited the house and land, gender notwithstanding, thus insuring a great number of women heads of household—a small and obscure concession, which over a period of time worked enormous changes in everyday relations. But as the eldest child also had the obligation to house and provide for their siblings, this guaranteed that domestic quarreling would,
à la Tchekov
, completely subsume the energies which would otherwise flow toward the overthrow of the state or contests of rival political factions. In Astingiland, all the battles of the Central Empires were fought out in the arena of the family. And ours was no different in that respect, except perhaps that as all three of us were only children, we were spared the care of poor elderly relations, and thus lived an unreal existence without the daily object lessons of declining powers and abject failure.