In Partial Disgrace (36 page)

“
Si spus-am ochiului meu trist: Imbrâtiseazâ
!”

And then the translation, in perfect Oxbridge cadences:

“And then who knows whether it is better to be or not to be? But everyone knows that what does not exist feels no pain, while pains in life are many, pleasures few, to be?”

“Good Lord,” the Professor expostulated. “Even the dogs in Cannonia bark in a foreign tongue.” And from the kennel, only broken-winded yelps.

The Princess had lost herself in thought. Mother genuinely tried to deflect her from this course.

“What
are
they doing up there?” the Princess queried nervously.

The men were facing each other, apparently doing a kind of calisthenics, though upon closer inspection, it was rather a kind of grave conducting of a silent orchestra.

“My husband has devoted himself to the learning of grace, which he has no instinct for. First, conducting lessons from Gundel, the great closet maestro of Monstifita, then flamenco lessons, Greco-Roman wrestling, and ballet at forty-five. Can you imagine?”

But the Princess did not look up or react to this. She insisted, rather, in dwelling upon the history of each of her scars, from her Roman nose (a piano top had collapsed) to her petite cicatrized feet (the bones were growing in the wrong direction, she had been told.) She had also apparently been convinced by a certain Dr. Halban of Monstifita to move that peculiar female member of wondrous nerves, her
sucre d’orange
as she put it, closer to the urethral passage, a two-step procedure which would allow her to mount more easily ocean’s orgiastic wave.

Ainoha stared at Princess Zanäia for some time, watching as she traced her scars with her forefinger, adumbrating their causes and consequences. Then she threw herself into the river. Staying under for an anxiously long interval, she emerged some fifty yards away with a collar of water lilies, and shouted back to shore, “Surely there are worse things than monogamy!” Then she paddled aimlessly about, trying a number of different strokes, none of which relaxed her, until finally she realized she had no choice but to return to the tiny beach. But no sooner had she dried off than her royal confidant asked her if she could be of assistance in gaining entrance to the Silbürsmerze morgue, so that the Princess might make certain measurements of any female corpses there, as it was common knowledge that the Astingi women’s
apparat
was the least complicated in the world, and also rumored to run horizontally.

Mother replied that this was certainly a myth, though no doubt a useful one. But she was neither used to exercising self-control nor to asking someone to stop speaking in her presence. And she was also surprised to realize that indignity was as difficult to come by in this situation as compassion.

“Oh, I know you ardent women detest frigid women,” the Princess wailed.

Mother replied somewhat helplessly, “But I know no one at the morgue.”

The Princess was downcast. All her scars seemed to raise slightly. Tilting her head to one side, lips pursed, her nervous glance finally solidified, it was clear she was contemplating a measurement upon the most prominent live specimen of Astingi-related womanhood.

“You are quite the iconoclast,” Mother offered icily.

“Actually, no,” the Princess moaned, “just a misfit,” and burst into tears.

Ainoha had soiled her chemise.

Searching for the perfect non sequitur, Ainoha was mercifully interrupted by Catspaw, who had sensed his Mistress’s distress. He tottered down the steep path in a Russian blouse and white spats, precariously balancing a silver tray with several fruit spritzers and what appeared to be a skull from Father’s collections. He was extemporizing even before he stopped before the Princess.

“Here lies the water; good; here stands the man; good: if the man go to this water and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes—mark you that; but if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself:
argal
, he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life.”

“Bravi.” The Princess clapped her translucent hands.

“Goodness gracious,” the Naiad groaned. “Later, dear Catspaw,
argal
, not now.”

Pain crossed his face as he turned on his heel and began to trudge back up the path. At one point, he turned to recite the breathless messenger’s speech from
Macbeth
, but Ainoha, drawing her hand across her throat, cut him off.

Topsy was flagging and kept looking longingly across the river.

“In order to compensate for the mind’s imperfections,” Father was saying, “all the other senses must be put into compensatory concert. Now that we have run out of
session
, we must be quiet.”

They stood stock-still for some minutes.

“Do you feel it?” Father queried.

“Yes, indeed, a kind of energy . . .”

“A displaceable energy, in itself neutral, but able to join forces with another impulse. An immanent movement?”

“Blast, now I’ve lost it!” The Professor snapped his fingers and groaned.

“No matter. The patient takes what she needs. You don’t know what it is, but she takes what she needs and leaves the rest.
Semplice ma mysterioso
.”

The Professor gesticulated sardonically to the heavens. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever be permitted to play my own cadenzas in this concert?”

“Sir, speak sequentially, without ungainly pauses. Where you choose to breathe is where her character is defined.”

The Professor sullenly took up the cord and dog, and with quick strides headed for the rope bridge, gradually lengthening the distance between the two men. Father followed, correcting the Professor’s various postures and gaits, a repertoire which, to his credit, was expanding:

“Much too correct,
nicht blutwallungen, brutalmente
. . . Now, there we go, that’s better . . . There . . .
Allegro maestoso
. . . No, no—fast but not all that fast. There, easy, but not too easy.
Adagio, adagio, adagio, adagio, adagio, adagio
!”

The Professor’s Trabuko had fallen from his mouth, leaving a trail of embers and ash down his sweat-stained shirtfront. His gaze was locked on a grove of trees on the far side of the river, and Felix himself was taken aback when he saw the winding file of naked girls, their hair undone, jars on their shoulders, bells on their anklets, garlanded with coins, gold chains, and shards of glass. The Peraperduga had been set in motion, one hundred paranymphs dancing in the wilderness in search of purling streams as yet unknown, praying for rain in three languages on the back road to Silbürsmerze, and shivering for joy. A dry muddy-colored rainbow arched over their wild hymns like a faded provincial opera set.

“What can it mean?” the Professor whispered hoarsely, and Felix intoned sadly:

“For us, it is only the definitive sign of drought. Or worse.”

The sun had been cut off quite suddenly by the bluff, as the ladies were startled by a horrific sucking sound.

“Strangely enough,” Mother observed evenly, “the river is often ugliest at dusk.”

The sucking continued and the Princess gazed out nervously at the Mze, which was busily regurgitating a new island: an ovoid slab of primordial mud flecked with quartz.

“Receiving semen is my greatest ecstasy,” pronounced the Princess apropos of nothing.

They returned to the house in a nude monotonous march.

At the peak of floodtime there is absolute silence, as every discord has been harmonized. But now with its strange resorbent sound, the river seemed to be looking to acquire a language at the very moment it had lost its power of metaphor. It was as if the Mze had lost its primal force, had tired of making limpid aesthetic statements and become self-conscious, yearning to be expressed. Its gurgle was rather like actors in a play whose lines are so densely poetic you cannot grasp them or the action; just the opposite of Father reading to me, that tumultuous cataract, those enfilades of dirty soldiers marching through the night. If this were a language its waterfall was now played out, its once curved body flat and meager, the pother as its base, vanished. The surface rapids were no longer visible, curving backward in sulfurous currents. There was no osmosis, no flowing—just a series of little scum-covered puddles, half-suffocated with water lilies and spiked rushes, into which ivory scavenger gulls, no longer able to plunge for fish, gingerly stepped, dreary, sad, and invested with an air of desperate deprivation. Poorly equipped, they carried away mysterious and far-from-appetizing fragments of this language, which in no time at all reappeared on the newly exposed rocks as a squirming white cape of excrement.

As an unwanted encore, Waterlily had launched into a conclusion of Astingi frontier songs, snatches from the decasyllabic “Ballads of Heroes” (
Kange Krajiŝnice
) of which every Astingi girl had a repertoire of hundreds—short song-cycles formulated in the fifteenth century to conquer the boredom of the men’s endless recited epics. I had always thought their artistic value slight, but as she refashioned them in
voix mixte
, her uvula flickering, ad lib with variations as the player pleases, she emptied the landscape of everything save the text, and Semper Vero consisted of only the solitary singer and her page.

The ladies were playing desultory tennis in men’s whites when the Topsy party returned, a brace of Chetvorah chasing down and retrieving any ball which left the court. The straw target was stuffed black with arrows.

The Professor was red-faced but proud, and Father walked behind, pale but also proud. The Princess waved her racquet, and the Professor, showing off, dropped into a half crouch as Topsy heeled.

“Nervorum atque cerebri mala affecto (don’t get creative on me),” Father hissed in camp Latin.

The Chetvorah sat on either side of the net like referees, waiting for a mishit and pointedly ignoring Topsy. The Professor thought they were slyly winking at him.

“And how did my little darling do?” the Princess queried breathlessly, one eye on her pet and another on a ball rolling slowly off the court.

“She takes it all very well,” the Professor beamed. “Not bad at all,” Father informed the party, “considering her rational part is defectuous and impeached.” Then he went to kiss Mother, whose hair was still wet. “How goeth it?” he whispered in her ear.

“Oh, we do not enjoy seeing one another, but would be unhappy if we didn’t,” Ainoha mused. “She’s not in love with her husband, and what’s worse, not in love with anyone else.” She had on that fake brave grin which always affected Felix more than her natural smile.

“If I were religious, I would pray for one thing, dear heart,” she whispered as Father took her in his arms, “and that is, we ought to leave . . . the retail business.”

“My thoughts exactly.” He held her close. “The best pet is a pet idea.”

They walked back to the Professor and Princess, who were also talking earnestly and intimately. Topsy was calm, golden flecks in her hazel eyes.

“The time has come for the ultimate reinforcement,” Felix gastriloquized, and after taking the cord from the Professor’s pocket, he ambled out on the lawn away from the court. “You see, training finally becomes four-dimensional, not by aspiring beyond the material, but by humblingly, gruelingly, and systematically working every fine point into the body until it becomes second nature.”

First he gently pulled on a fold of Topsy’s neck, then released the cord nonchalantly, keeping the flat of his hand on the place the cord had occupied. Turning to his audience, he rasped, “It’s the last mile, of course, which is the hardest to hold.” Topsy blinked coquettishly.

“Care, take care,” Father whispered as he drew away from her with a slow backward tango-tread, tracing out a pause in which his partner could play in and adorn. Then he raised his right arm perpendicularly and gently pressed his left hand against her back.

“Toho,” he whispered, and the dog slowly turned her head, eye on his hand, tail flagging, but mute. “Bend,” he orated softly, “
bend
,” and Topsy slowly arched her back, raised her head, and lifting a forepaw ever so slightly, she turned and twirled.

“Utter transcendence,” the Princess swooned.

“A million-dollar move,” the Professor ejaculated.

“That will do,” Father whispered to Topsy. Then, balancing on one boot, exhaling as the breath was drawn out of the dog as well as the assembly, gradually spreading his hands as if he were pulling apart dough, all movement was suspended. The air itself seemed to disappear, sucked away, and the earth pulled all heads downwards. Then Felix slowly pivoted on one leg, and scarcely giving the sign of a downbeat, he concluded the muted elegy as all the players resumed breathing.

“All we want in this world, all we want,” Father whispered hoarsely, “is that the damn dog follow our lead, that she walk calmly by our side with her head high.” A tear came to his eye. “But . . . this is all too rare. Not one in a thousand dogs is worth keeping.”

“But to move the patient from hysterical inversion to common misery and to forget the self-dramatizing,” the Professor comforted him, “
that
is progress!”

Waterlily was reaching a harsh crescendo, a cosmic C-minor, then a roulade of one-and-a-half octaves of stunning rapidity. She hurled out the notes to the sky, neither words nor sounds, but distended spheres, mucoid globules unattached to anything.

She was caterwauling like a bathhouse nymph.

The chatter was animated on the terrace that late afternoon. “Can you imagine how glorious it is,” the Princess giggled, “to see
into
a dog, and to tease oneself into her exactly at her center, the place out of which she exists as a dog?”