In Partial Disgrace (23 page)
The books were interspersed among jars with imperfect seals in which the fruits had turned as white as crustaceans in formaldehyde, as well as some bottles of wine improperly corked, with an inch of tar residue at the bottom, and some canned goods with wrinkled, misspelled labels imperfectly glued. Other curiosities included architectural drawings of unbuilt follies, failed sluicegates from the lower reaches of the Mze, imaginary tributaries of inaccurate mapmakers, collapsed waterworks, failed bridges, and a large collection of ebonite boxes exhibiting every valve which had failed on the property, every engine part which had given way, pieces of shrubs which had not made it through a severe winter, masonry from cracked foundations, snapped ropes, short-circuited wire, seeds which had not come true, cracked bricks, split joints, busted coils, and broken couplings—all clearly dated and labeled with speculations as to the nature of the stress and fatigue, as well as the consequences.
Of special interest to the Professor was a grid of empty cubbyholes, each with a small gilt frame. Here and there inside was a conventional trilobite, and to its left a cousin stoically bearing scars of some future organism, while to the right, coiled in shame, resided other relations, which had departed history through their imperfections. Unlike the vitrines holding the guns in the dining room, which were on display to show their contents’ beauty, their appreciation in value, and the acumen of the collector, this was a collection of vulnerability, inexplicability, and terror. First was an empty hole signifying the initial colonization never explained, followed by all the smug forms of life incapable of getting where they had been found, the ones who couldn’t swim but crossed the sea, the snails too big to be carried by birds and without the means to cling to driftwood. At the very center was a large hole with a small handkerchief for a curtain, making a kind of funerary to memorialize the gap between reptiles and birds, and containing a long, dry pectoral fin of a flying fish, which, frightened by an oar, had leapt ten feet into the air and dropped into Father’s boat.
“It is a long way from fright to utility, Berganza,” said Father. “And yet”—he beamed as he said this—“the exhibit shows, if not explains, life from the nonliving, does it not?”
The Professor complimented him on the professionalism.
“Yes, yes, you’ve set up the collapse just like Ptolemy, step by step.”
The empty holes were there to be stared into, a diorama dramatizing what happens when you are forced to abandon every theory which explains succession. The entire study was an antidote to the bourgeois dining room, a chamber of imponderables dedicated to the awesome persistence of the unfit. It portrayed not a struggle for life carried on by the best-adapted individuals, but laws of which we are totally ignorant, forms endowed with a novel character either annihilated or reverted to a standard of mediocrity, and organisms which, in the face of all good things, nevertheless moved toward destruction. The display was devoted to the theory of natural selection in order to show how it shrugged off the problem of evil, and how an enfeebled constitution might be passed on. Of our species, the only motive and characteristic seemed to be persistent exaggeration, like orchids or butterflies, whose enhanced singularity is simply incomprehensible.
In one of the boxes were two jars of Hippodamia beetles, one all dead, the other swarming.
“I defy you, Berganza, to describe the difference between those who perished and those who yet crawl. Did those who survive exhibit purpose? If a blow of fate were good for a species, would we not then knock all our breeding animals in the head?”
The cornices of Father’s den were black with the tubes of rolled-up charts. The greatest attention was given to a German one, “The Scale of Being,” across which various preening species gamboled in ingenious movable cutouts with tacks, eyelets, and tiny golden cords sewn in their backs. Father and the Professor spent many pleasant Sundays arguing the order of the warm-blooded hierarchy, being careful to distinguish between the merely peculiar and those who were clearly victims of fate. The candidates moved up and down the chart, one day favoring the Professor’s inexplicable choice, the duck, and another Father’s, the underrated pig. (“Neither so nasty nor lazy as depicted.”) Both animals had soon vaulted the poor horse, whose only act of intelligence, they posited, was to run away, a kind of continual emigration akin to fish and birds, but without their drama and regularity.
Of course, the dog and the ape vied for the topmost slots on “The Scale of Being,” the two men agreeing in a spirit of comity that while the ape had a higher intellect, the emotions of the noble dog were more developed. Once this was ascertained, they turned to a chart of French manufacture, “The Tree of Life,” a lovely bit of evolutionary metaphor with each species named in a venous leaf sprouting from its family branch. Scipio and Berganza began by drawing new branches connecting the main limbs, which wavered oddly, as if a child had drawn them in, for it was possible to rank emotional classifications as well as intellectual categories by drawing new leaves on the new branches. In these leaves, the ape was clearly the winner in self-esteem, self-control, cautiousness, and powers of imitation. Man was ahead in matters of hope, ideality, deceit, and sense of the marvelous. The dog excelled in adhesiveness, benevolence, conscientiousness, and veneration. While all three seemed equal in amativeness, homesickness, and love of approbation, only the dog shared with man the capacities of shame, remorse, indefinite morality, and, above all, the sense of the ludicrous. They added to this perhaps the most elevated sense of all, the dog’s superior dread of the police. For a time, the dog’s rich emotional life and preternatural sagacity vaulted him to the very topmost branches of “The Tree of Life,” and there these qualities perched in the topmost branches like a clumsy, frightened cat, holding on for dear life as the remaining categories fluttered down like so many autumnal reflections.
In these rankings of nobility, thirteen Sundays were allotted to the horse, fourteen to the ox, seventeen to the sheep, eleven to the goat, five to the duck, seven to the pig, and thirty-nine to the dog, with occasional forays into the elephant and the whale, and one interminable session on marsupials. Anecdotal as well as scientific evidence was submitted: a bull who nuzzled a man who had saved him from lightning; cats who knocked telephones out of their owner’s hands; a dog who bit a lesion out of his owner’s leg which turned out to be cancerous; creatures that warned of epileptic fits, earthquakes, hurricanes, and air-raids, in which none of the five senses could have been involved. There were also spirited defenses of those at which the charge of stupidity had been leveled, digressions into the savage species which had been eliminated (unaware of the services man could render them), not to mention the pointlessly destructive fox, the disgusting guinea pig (so indifferent to his surroundings), the tendency of carnivores to butcher more than they could possibly eat, cats which appealed only to the lowest grade of portrait artists, and the tendency of the elephant to bear a grudge. It was clear that one could be elevated either by useful service or courageous threat to authority—only the dog was elevated by its power of spontaneous love—and in all these discussions, the highest position man achieved out of a ranking of fifty was in the low teens, just ahead of livestock, on the grounds that very little is required to talk, and even less to think.
“It was our beloved Spinoza,” the Professor summed up, “who pointed out that while all animals are excusable, it does not follow that all men are blessed.”
On occasion they even entered the true domain of philosophy, putting aside questions of category, of how thoughts might arise without recourse to thinking, of whether one could stop thinking without a thought, and if “The Tree of Life” forks at the top, whether its roots are thus a mirror of the crown. The Professor confessed he had never seen a tree’s roots, and Father took him that very afternoon into the Marchlands, where trees were uprooted from the swampy soil with every storm—great elms on their sides, roots inscribing an arc as wide as the branches, some still growing along the ground. Father pointed out that of all trees, a fallen one is most useful, gathering more flora and fauna than the most majestic, isolated example. The fallen tree which still lives and thus multiplies other forms of life—not awesome-appearing, worthless to gather, and fallen out of the frame of beauty and providence, but functional to its final molecule and “worth even worship,” was how Father left it.
They returned to the den, there to contemplate in silence a fact of which they were always partially aware but had not taken sufficiently into account, namely that “The Tree of Life” and “The Scale of Being” had apparently nothing to do with one another. They had embarked on that long journey of adding zeros to the numeral of themselves, for only the most courageous of men could admit that as their knowledge increased by infinite magnitudes, their basic ignorance had scarcely diminished.
But in Cannonia, where time flows back and forth, and observers are always linked to the observed, it was difficult to deny that distant feeling that everything is morphically interconnected and resonates.
I had the distinct apprehension that given just the slightest excuse—another glass of whiskey or another chart—these two men would have sauntered out the door and left their families in their great houses, renouncing their life insurance and wealthy clientele for the road, leashed and snaffled together as oft-erring vagabond folk, diligently scrutinizing men, loving women in haste, reveling in animal and gustatory marvels, and traversing the humming plains of Flanders, or the mellow gardens of France, or the desolate Spanish uplands, playing jokes on prime ministers, kings, and potentates, and finally traveling east to the most Byzantine of nations to give the reigning pasha a hot foot.
(Rufus)
On our return to Semper Vero, I was given a rough inventory of the many classical statues. Each time Iulus’s parents had wanted to modernize the bathrooms, they had decided instead upon yet another piece of garden sculpture. We circled a huge zinc figure of a winged woman from the design of an unknown Parisian sculptor. Her wings were quite small for her body and she held her right breast with her left hand as the dogs urinated merrily on her feet. Further on sat a cast-iron statue of an Eastern knight in need of immediate repair, a huge knotted sash barely covering his feverish groin, his big-balled horse rearing precipitously upon a millstone so that he might be turned toward an enemy like a weathervane. Then a rather nervous bronze Buddha with extraordinary earlobes, (“Not a copy,” it was pointed out), and finally a cluster of three negro boys, one in breechcloths with a snake in his hands, another in pharaonic headdress with a vessel on his shoulders, and a third in rather elegant and modern tennis shorts, holding a sphere in one hand and a handle of something which had been broken off in the other.
“All cast locally,” Iulus said, pinging the fine legs of each athlete as we passed, humming a local ditty, “
Wo ist der Negerstatue mit einer Schlanger in der Hand
?” (“Where Is the Negro Statue with the Snake in its Hand?”) I was very happy to be among this bric-a-brac, which appeared so happy to have me among them.
We passed a neoclassical rotunda without a name, apparently built simply to show off a rare whiterind fir tree, which had grown “naturally” into the shape of a lyre (only one of a number of dendrodological curiosities), and ultimately we strode across a series of low stone humpbacked bridges to the “Freemason’s Pavilion,” a roofless brick and stucco ruin with a blue slate cornice and windows in the shape of five and six pointed stars, surrounded by red beeches and Japanese maples. The stucco had been peeled away artfully from its exposed arches, framing broken Saracen columns and a severely but precisely damaged stairway to nowhere—“Just the sort of place,” my guide commented with his usual abstracted air, “where one might wander from time to time after dinner in the library, and find an unknown guest who might amplify a line of Dante you did not quite understand.” Then we meandered past a group of gnarled olive trees, enormously high, which still belonged to the same peasant family who had refused to sell to any of the former owners, and now towered above even the maples. Its fruit was still harvested by the same family, or rather picked up from the ground after the first winter winds, Iulus related proudly.
The final stop on our itinerary was his grandfather’s discovery—the source of the Mze. Less was known then about the peoples and gods who occupied the banks of this river than those of the Nile itself. The Mze dove, resurfaced, and redoubled upon itself so many times that it was only recently that people connected its parts. We were climbing the crest of a hill, by no means the highest locally, with the only unlandscaped meadow within the park, when we came upon an empty shack of no discernable function. It sat there in disillusioned clarity, with no nature around or behind it. Iulus pointed out a listing piece of gutter which fed a rain barrel, at the bottom of which a rusted spigot dribbled onto the ground, apparently the origin of four hundred and eighty miles of serpentine river basin. He pointed again to the collection point of the Hermes well and thence to the ponds, one roaring like an engine, the other still as a mote, then to the broken dam and its dry cascade, and finally to a bright, harmonious, and sweet-flowing stream which wound in its infancy to a sluice in the village, where it began to rage from human mismanagement—and shortly thereafter, outflanking and checkmating its own tributaries, confused and inundatory, simply dissolved. We had sunk to our boottops in the sodden grass. The dogs drank happily but appeared bored. Iulus waved us back to the house.
We had gone only a few hundred yards down the gentle incline when we came upon a huge mound of earth only recently thrown up.
“An Astingi warrior,” he explained, “no doubt of high rank. They bury them mounted on their horse, even if the horse is alive.”
“What happened?” I said in my smallest voice.
“Just another bloody and inconclusive struggle,” he shrugged, and then sighed gravely. “Any disclaimer for lost pasts is childish.”
But for me, no amount of ignorance or atrocity could take the magic out of Semper Vero, that compact universe of pure play, the promise of a life of singular details and no general upkeep, a life of the
given
. I was watching myself have an emotion which had no name. It wasn’t exactly love; I was happy in a different way. For the first time in my life I had a companion who I liked precisely because I knew I could never be like him. I was also losing the facility of my sincerity.
“You are looking at me with such interest,” he said, “that I hope you won’t become disappointed with me.”
On the terrace we cleaned our muddy boots with bayonets. Through the French doors I could make out nothing but vases of the largest flowers and portraits of the boldest nudes I had ever seen. He let the dogs in and they thudded immediately into a groaning goosedown sofa. He apologized for knowing so little of the history of his own home. This was neither a matter of secrecy nor deception, he insisted; his parents simply did not know nor care about its
original
functions. Then he offered me a chair on the terrace, sat down on his haunches like a hound, and as he began to talk, a large black crow with brilliant black plumage suddenly alighted on his shoulder.
“Semper Vero has been in my family for only one hundred years and it has been for sale for most of that time. When my mother’s adoptive father, Priam, inherited the property in the 1840s from a distant cousin, he ignored the architecture, eyes only for the fat warped open volume of the overgrown and undistinguished park. On trains, boats, and carts he brought in rare evergreens from all over the world to make an arboretum, the first devoted solely to that species in the Central Empires—as if what they needed in this vast mountain periphery, filled then with virgin forest, was
more
trees. This indigenous forest he indeed sold off, wood lot by wood lot, to buy rarer and rarer evergreen seedlings and specimen plantings from other destitute estates. In the buildings, including his own home, he took not the slightest interest. Architecture’s only reason for existence, in his mind, was to give some inanimate organizing texture to the landscaping. But there was not a vegetable shoot in Cannonia whose story he could not tell. I used to follow him on his walks, and when I couldn’t name a shrub, he encouraged me to make one up, and then had a copper nametag made for my little fiction. Perhaps it was a kind of holding action,” he murmured solemnly, “this passion for the evergreen, or perhaps a reaction to the desultory and wanton mining, his hatred for the veins of antimony, quartz, and garnets which had seduced even the Neanderthals. Not to mention his absolute loathing for cattle, which he would shoot without a qualm if they even so much as looked across the fence at a rare shrub.” The crow left his shoulder as peremptorily as it had arrived, but he gave no notice.
“But then one day, at fifty years of age, when the trees had reached a nice maturity, when the vistas had filled in nicely and all the children grown, Grandfather Priam got up suddenly from supper one evening, took his cape and cane, walked out on the terrace and down the drive . . . and never returned. No one ever discovered what became of him—though there was a rumor of a pilgrimage to a church in the East. At the fullest measure of his life, he simply . . . disappeared . . . as if the genius of his place could only be preserved by his exile.”
He said this with a tone of surprise as if he had just heard it for the first time, and turning slightly pale, left the subject by motioning to me to follow him down the winding drive where his grandfather had abandoned his little empire.
The drive had been modestly constructed in such a way as to suggest there was nothing more than a vineyard shack or an abandoned quarry at its end, but I noted its every turning might be defended by a handful of lightly armed men. At each bend, mountain torrents dove beneath severe humpbacked stone bridges, wide enough only for a single cart. These, he mentioned, had been constructed in the thirteenth century for the visit of the Blind King, Agram, who had desired to construct a castle and taxing facility upon the heights. The King with his beautiful dead gaze had been led along the road by the local nobles, winding round and round the short volcano by the longest possible route, until at last the Blind King pronounced the vantage too high and abandoned his project, to general relief.
As the road suddenly became nothing more than a cart track, one could make out in the failing light the town of Silbürsmerze, taking its name from the glistening carmine and tarnished silver heath which surrounded it. It hung suspended like a faint etching between blowzy curtains of protective mists, the sort of scene you wanted to rub up against to see if the color would come off. We forded the shallows of the Vah across a great sheath of granite, and as we approached, the town enfolded upon itself, like the mighty tribulations of a rose in a second, slightly desperate bloom. Unfamiliar as it was, I could not help but marvel at the peace it yielded, a town that was still connected with our dreams, the dreams we know are dreams while we are dreaming them and thus effect no fear. For we all walk the ramparts and narrow streets of a town very much like Silbürsmerze, coils of royal blue smoke from peat and fodder fires hovering on her outskirts, where heartbreak remains an aura but is not yet adumbrated, a place where melancholy still gives us character but has yet to become garrulous. Ah, Silbürsmerze: always veering towards sentimentality, but never quite making it.
At the very center of town we entered an amazingly severe, asymmetrical seventeenth-century square, completely arcaded, continuously vaulted, all friezes, alcoves, and spandrels; curdled tympanas, curved archivolts, and gables with crockets; constructed of molded colored bricks so that not a single square inch was the same color. At the north corner stood a church with a covered double-stair and two towers, one of five rectangles and three domes, the other a Saxon clock tower with an Astingi inscription which Iulus translated as “Each hour dooms Man, the last one kills him.” Squatting down in that off-center square, one had the distinct impression of a sealed, impermeable environ, a kind of conservative utopia, but a short walk to any of its corners revealed a narrow street, lane, or worn stair; Silbürsmerze was
all
exits. And there was nothing at its center, no statue, bell, or well, nothing but an irregular patch of diseased lawn with a low deteriorating stone wall about it.
“Be still,” Iulus whispered, “there are a thousand eyes upon us,” and it dawned on me that my interlocutor was the only human figure I had seen since my arrival. The only sound in the square was the strange hesitant
clop clop
of manual typewriters, hunting and pecking like a hobbled horse echoing across cobbled courtyards. Despite the absence of people, it seemed a place where no one ever died.
We sat there on the low stone wall for nearly an hour, buffeted by gusts of wind like the exhalations of an excited woman. My sense of mission was growing ever fainter. More than once I turned to my host with some wide-eyed authentic question, but then thought the better of it. The silent depths of that hour in the square, and something in his patient manner, canceled out the earnest gradegrubbing student in me forever.
Suddenly Iulus clapped his hands to his knees, as if he just remembered something, and ushered me into a half-timbered building with clerestory windows. Loping through an arcaded inner courtyard with a barbarian penile millstone displayed at its center, he went directly to a vaulted basement lit with window wells, an enormous room with Spanish studded leather walls and a black and red marble Moorish fireplace, which in palmier days had served as the town mint. The walls were hung with hundreds of hunting trophies, upon each of which was draped freshly killed game—live meat air-dried upon embalmed meat. From every cornice antlered heads stared with glassy eyes, snipey noses, and erect ears, the tissues of their half-open mouths painted a flamingo pink, maws coated with resin. From these obdurate horns and glistening snouts, from the long faces of forest animals, dangled the marbled membranous cuts of their fellow species—ribs, shoulders, and tenderloins; chops, briskets, and roasts; sausages, organ systems, and scaloppini; intricately carved carcasses, filleted silhouettes of musculature, the missing domesticated relatives’ bodies beautifully butchered and appended to the head of their species’ wild prototype. Haunch of stag venison, loins of flushed forest pig, crown roast of fetal lamb, livers dangling in a small silken net from the tail feathers of a cock pheasant in flight; rigid purple skinned hindquarters of rabbit straddling the figure of a stuffed dancing hare. It was as if the ark itself had foundered and sunk, turned upside down in the shallows, disgorging its drowned and butchered cargo of carcasses into eddies of diffused light. And we floated through this haphazard catalogue of delicacies like calm and purposeful sharks. The folk of Silbürsmerze had been through quite a bit, but it was evident that they would never starve.
At the very center of this hygienic and anatomically correct abattoir was a blue and white enameled metallic box, the size of a small treasure chest, glowing with a strange out-of-place sanctity, and surrounded by a few landmines with the earth still fresh upon them. Stenciled on the top was the logo “LIBERTY PURE LARD (Roberts & Oake, Chicago, USA).” It had been dropped from an American airplane, killing a shepherd, and they had not been able to identify a single item in it. Inside, along with condensed milk, concentrated orange juice, Cheerios, Mars bars, baked beans, Spam, and soya curds, were several five-pound packages of margarine in plastic globes, a bullet-sized nodule of coloring embedded at each center.