The Absolute, page 16
“That is, religion is the agency responsible for the transcendental nomination of political avatars . . .”
“At least so we Jesuits understand it. And don’t play the idiot, because it’s precisely thanks to your having understood the results of this insight that you’ve taken the trouble to briefly escape from your little friends in the Party . . . Martov, Kamenev, Zinoviev, all that lot. Welcome to the game of grand politics . . . Coffee? A glass of water?”
“You don’t have vodka? I couldn’t find a single bottle in all of Switzerland.”
“No.”
“Water, then. One question. How do you manage without women? It’s not that I . . .”
“Perfectly well, thank you. What, precisely, is the matter that brings you here?”
“I don’t know if I should . . .”
“You can call me Philippe, my dear Vladimir Ilyich. You’re among people you can trust: the arm of Nicholas II’s secret service does not reach here. And, of course, I’ll take everything you tell me as a secret of the confessional.”
“In that case . . . There’s something I want to know!”
“I’m listening . . .”
“If a religion is a State, or at least a State of Matters of the Faith, what I’d like to understand is how Paul the Apostle could invent Catholicism starting from Christ, a subject who lacked being at the moment the Pauline truth was announced. Because, let’s not forget, at that moment He was dead, and Paul . . .”
“Saint, please . . .”
“. . . and Saint Paul announced as a transcendent truth the only impossible event in the existence of Jesus: the Resurrection. I want to know, basically, how Saint Paul organized his religious party by crossing a subject no longer living with an unprovable event. I want to know how, starting from this convergence of absurdities, he founded the possibility of a doctrine in history that includes the entire human species.”
“A Marxist wants to dream up his own Jesus, to generate action in the world through a political law?”
“Yes. Except now it’s no longer the Son, but the Party.”
“Ah, but how interesting . . . And what is the place of God the Father in your system?”
“With all due respect . . .”
“With all due respect, you want to say that from your point of view God is unnecessary, that theology is a field of study with no object, and that nothing in the Universe is better, greater or truer than what we ourselves are able to create. It means that for you, there are proofs and yet nothing is sacred. And therefore you can absolve yourself of all truth with capital letters, or all illusion of truth, prepared instead to build a conceptual artifact based on efficiency.”
“You might say that I want to encourage an ideal, or at least a reflection on the possibility of collective belief . . .”
“If you want it, thy will be done. Do you know the famous phrase ‘Cathedrals are made with mud and dung, but are not themselves mud and dung’?”
“No.”
“I’ll bequeath it to you. Now you can quote it from armored trains, balconies, pulpits and rostrums whenever you want to inflame the proletariat with your speeches. What I can tell you is that Saint Paul’s bid for resurrection doesn’t require the prior life of Christ; in his opinion the ‘realist’ biographical story (which the rest of the Apostles take up in detail) even disfigures the story’s perfection.”
“The resurrection of a being without a previous life to justify it . . . What a splendid idea!”
“Indeed it is . . . the uncaused cause. That is, God, or His most magnificent invention, religion.”
“And so . . .”
“And so, brother Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, welcome. Brother Francisco will show you to your cell . . .”
“One last question.”
“Yes . . . ?”
“There are issues linked to setting up the Party, guiding the masses, and struggling against amateurish enthusiasm and economist tendencies before we seize control of the government. And then, once the stage of triumphant insurrection is complete, there’s the question of how to manage the State and build a socialism that . . .”
“Yes . . . ?”
“What I mean is, how did Saint Paul receive . . .”
“Grace?”
“Grace, yes. Or let’s say, the miracle of his marvelous invention.”
“As the last Christian and founder of Catholicism,” said Groiselliere, “he wasn’t conditioned or converted by anyone, and so in his case we can dispense with the moralist claptrap about ‘mystical illumination’ as a prize for effort and suffering. Saint Paul was all bad breath, ferocity, calculation and the will to power. Like Saint Ignatius of Loyola, you might say. Well. Where were we? Ah. As for your stay in this monastery . . . you can leave the door of your cell unlocked.”
“But what about my belongings?”
“Don’t worry about them; here everything belongs to everyone. We Jesuits consider property to be theft.”
To judge by events, Lenin’s stay at Louvain monastery bore its fruits. In July 1903, after nine months of seclusion and training, he reappeared in Brussels and London where the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party was taking place. By pure strength of determination—“reality is power, everything else is illusion”—he led debates and captured for his faction (the Bolsheviks) a sizable chunk of the leadership and party membership. His firm decision to organize and lead a partisan system that sought to forge an ideology and represent society’s transformative forces would in time become a political perspective and modus operandi known as “Leninism.” Obviously, those in the know would also have baptized it—the verb isn’t accidental—as “practical Loyolism,” or better yet, “Deliuskinism.” But Philippe de Groiselliere, along with the rest of the Jesuits, preferred to remain silent in this respect. Even after a few decades, works about the Society of Jesus as well as biographies of the Soviet leader neglect to mention the initiation of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) into the tactics and strategies that helped him to organize the Party and take power, imparted by the Jesuits and based on my great-grandfather’s interpretation of Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises.4
Naturally, having reached this point, many readers will find incomprehensible the blithe way that my great-grandfather washed his hands of all responsibility—or paternity—with respect to his annotations of Loyola, as if he didn’t suspect their importance and dimensions, or as if he’d decided to attribute to them a merely provisional character, as a simple draft of future works. Maybe a sudden desire for violent suns and strange moons drove him to cast aside such adventures of thought, or maybe he felt—all at once, as a revelation—that the proper name that emerged from his annotations condensed the meaning of his work. The fact is that one day, in the midst of a phrase that unfolded in a series of variations on the famous “Meditation on Three Binaries,” his pen wrote the words: “Napoleon Bonaparte.” Andrei stopped, read his writing, gave a quiet sigh, rested his head for a minute on the palm of his hand, then closed the Spiritual Exercises, in so doing knocking the inkwell over the table. The ink gave a delicate gurgle before tracing out an anamorphic lake, a chimera, a daguerreotype of Arthur Rimbaud blurred by overexposure to desert fires, and the voluptuous ass of his future wife, appearing in the shadows of the closed room at noon. Then he stood up, walked out of the National Library and left Riga, never to return again.
* * *
4 To establish the causal relationship between Andrei Deliuskin’s writings and Leninist praxis, one must keep in mind the question of procedure.
As soon as he took control of the government, the Bolshevik leader handed over the exploitation of oil riches drawn from Russian soil to capitalists from the United States and England—something that the deposed Tsar had never dared to do—in exchange for a fabulous injection of money, which he applied to the sustained development of the productive forces. To put it another way, he used imperial powers to invent the working class in his country in order to justify the former Proletarian Revolution. Doesn’t this gesture show true understanding of the efficiency of the Pauline achievement, which founds the greatest ideological institution in the West—the Roman Church—on what Lenin calls a “nonexistent event” (the Resurrection of Jesus)? Such a political gesture—which no “leftist” understood at the time—clearly reveals to us that he took maximum advantage of the lessons imparted during his months at the monastery.
7
Andrei Deliuskin leaves the desks behind and reveals himself to be a serious but free young man: available, game for small adventures. He works with the stevedores in Danzig; his back broadens, his muscles swell. Incursion into fishing: tunas. A return to the port: cups and whores. Contrary to all expectations, he doesn’t want to rescue them or attempt anything other than to possess them multiple times, with an enthusiasm that recalls his father’s early years and notably exceeds his capacity for payment. Andrei fornicates like someone bleeding himself dry. Vlamincka Vilnius, the madame of the establishment (whom the more forward clients call Baby), notes this client’s abilities and, taking account of his merits, can’t help but admire the length of his carnal baton, the exquisiteness of his lightly schizoid style, the trembling shakes of his head and his general pinkish tone, which makes him look like a sturgeon anxious to swim upstream in search of a corner where he can spawn. The fine braiding of his frenulum, which he occasionally uses as a halter, definitively leaves her in ecstasy. But it’s a kind of granule, an oblong formation with sebaceous characteristics, palpitating in an unnerving and independent way, that most takes her breath away: under the smooth, slack skin, which draws back like a virgin’s at the slightest graze of her tongue’s tip, a society of homunculi seems to doze, the true principle of generation. Lying on the bed, naked, arms behind his head in the form of a pillow, Andrei allows himself to be inspected. His face paints a dandyish smile—unexpected on a young man of his age—as he says: “I’m like a monkey. I can repeat the same act an infinite number of times.” Baby offers him a contract with an insanely high figure and the possibility of rejecting clients once he’s fulfilled his average daily quota. Andrei rejects the offer and continues on his journey.
Olsztyn. Białystok. Does he go in the direction of Warsaw? No. After a detour, he passes through Lublin and arrives in Radom. Katowice. Krakow. Hungary? The hinterland of Central Europe? His movement forms the sketch of his hesitations. He seems to be guided by a southern tropism, with a slight tendency toward the East. All at once, a turn upward. Budapest, Linz, Munich, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, Erfurt, Leipzig, Dortmund, Hanover. In Amsterdam he gets work at an optician’s as a polisher. In his daily activity there’s a deceleration of the machine of thought, but since he works with magnifying lenses, he gets used to seeing shapes with an amplified grain. One afternoon, at a café, he meets a young lady. Barely have they exchanged a few words before she reveals her age, confesses she’s not a virgin but is single, and tells him that she’s in no rush to get married. Immediately Andrei takes these confidences as the flirtatious strategy of a woman presuming to be “modern.” While she’s speaking, Alicia Varmon’s gaze is somewhere else, which doesn’t seem to be a consequence of crossed eyes, but a strategy that lets her consider the merits of those present in the abstract. Andrei, in contrast, is perfectly conscious of each one of the details her clothes hide: the full waist, the warm milky thighs, the chestnut-colored pubic hair . . .
“Do you believe that everything that is possible, so long as it’s thinkable, exists and is therefore likely to be realized on earth?” he asks.
Varmon smiles for the first time (Andrei sees her uneven, healthy teeth) and looks at him out of the corner of her eye:
“Are you proposing an episode of sexual debauchery, or looking for the perfect definition of utopia?”
Andrei doesn’t need to hear anything else to know he’s in love.
Despite the promise of immediacy broached by this first dialogue, over the course of the next few meetings my great-grandfather discovers that fleshly access to his beloved is complicated. Although she speaks easily about the habits of different peoples—English pleasures, French tastes, Turkish glandular perversions—the possibilities of concretion go on being delayed. At every meeting, like the act of a malevolent God, Alicia appears escorted by a girlfriend. If this is a plan seeking to exalt her intrinsic merits by means of obstacles and rebuffs . . . then such dubious cleverness doesn’t stimulate or excite him. Martha Velin is dark, squat, plump and useless for anything but irritation. Through a strange insistence that Andrei understands to be romantic scruples, Alicia always insists on meeting him at the same time, at the same Viennese café, as their first meeting. And Martha Velin is present at every occasion, silent, impassive, her posture impeccable, her flabby flesh pressing into the iron back of the rococo chair (on the rare occasions she leaves them alone for a moment to go to the ladies’ room, Andrei is repulsed to observe the damning mark, the red magnolia-shaped furrow traced into the fat sow’s back). With his sensitivity honed by loathing, Andrei, who was never able to draw more than a rude monosyllable from her in the time when he still felt compelled to address her a word, thinks he hears murmurs of decay in that detestable organism. The internal wheezing of emphysema, the overly fluid gurgle of blood overflowing a cerebral artery about to burst, the plops of a chain reaction of explosions in the stomach diverticula.
Occasionally Alicia displays the fickleness of her mood: she prefers to go for a stroll. She takes Andrei’s arm, but it’s Martha Velin who handles her parasol, who protects her from the sun’s rays and whispers in her ear.
One day, however, the unexpected occurs: the chaperone doesn’t show up to a meeting. Andrei, who’s built up every illusion of happiness (even the ephemeral kind) based on getting rid of her presence, can’t help but realize that his budding emotion has a different quality than he’d expected. Being without Martha Velin is like floating in a void—agreeable, yes, but somewhat dull. Joined to Alicia, Martha is a repugnant pustule, a gob of spit in the face of beauty; jerked away all of a sudden, it tears something from the being to which it was attached: it’s as if his love were missing a vital element. Free now, Andrei doesn’t quite know what to do. And although he can vouch for the continued urgency of his desire, no longer under surveillance—every time he takes Alicia by the elbow to cross the street, every time her breast brushes against his arm—the strength of this emotion remains temporarily displaced by his curiosity about what has happened to his enemy. The rest of the outing is pleasant enough. They visit the Cathedral, where Alicia insists on kneeling before the stone slabs of the high altar that preserve the remains of her most important ancestors. Then they take a stroll around City Park, where they delight in the feats of the giant Belinzone, a Hercules nearly two meters tall, in a muscle shirt and tights glued to his thighs, trained to lift a gypsy caravan with his head as he launches fire from his mouth. She claps like a girl and blushes when Belinzone tosses her a sweet-smelling flower. When they reach Alicia’s home again, it’s already night. At the moment of the goodbye, believing that Martha’s absence permits him to act in a freer way, Andrei makes a move to approach his love and kiss her on the lips, but she anticipates him: she brings up her right hand to Andrei’s chest with a gesture to stop his advance, then suddenly lets it drop to his groin, keeping her fist open with its fingers slightly curved as if wanting to take hold of a small caliber cannonball. With remarkable determination she grasps Andrei’s testicles, stands on tiptoe and breathes into his ear: “This is all mine, and when the moment for it comes, I’m going to destroy you, I’m going to eat you up piece by piece, I’m not going to leave a single part of you intact. Gorgeous boy.” Then, with a little laugh, she goes into her house and slams the door in his face.
Back in the student pension where he’s staying, Andrei thinks about what’s happened. The combination of incongruous elements disconcerts him. Although in purely intellectual areas he’s demonstrated an extraordinary lucidity, in his dealings with women he remains subject to the dominant ideas of the period. The only thing that occurs to him is that Alicia’s attitude reveals an intense temperament. He worries over it. Does she consider him to be a prude? “Maybe she hoped for bolder behavior!”
After meditating on it deeply, instead of going to bed he heads back to Varmon’s place. When he gets there, he stops for a few seconds to catch his breath. Then, attentive to the hour and respectful of the neighbors’ sleep, he knocks gently on the door, murmuring: “Alicia . . .” No one answers. It surprises him. All at once, a horrible suspicion claws its way into his mind: a delinquent has broken into the house and the worst is already over. In a vision Andrei sees carved-up limbs, pulled-out eyes, blood-soaked hair. So as not to believe it, he insists with shouts and blows, passing quickly from discretion to anguish. The lamps in the neighborhood begin to turn on. The terror of scandal grinds down all remaining scruples: he finds the half-open window through which the murderer forced entry, and uses it to slip into the home of his beloved.
The first thing that draws his attention is the density of the silence, a rich and saturated silence that’s libidinous in its muffled echoes, like the silence of cemeteries; as well as the smell, also dense, with varying levels, delicate lower down and thicker at the heights, every nuance working the deft effects of its peculiarity upon the base of a central tone, a rigorous maceration of tuberoses dissolved in water, plus swirling dust. It’s the smell of an imprisoned soul in confinement, he thinks. And for a moment he surrenders to the easy contrast and imagines himself in the role of liberator, entering the room where Alicia moans—in chains but alive, desecrated perhaps, but alive! Then, alert, or maybe influenced by his fantasies, he thinks he hears a murmur, a groan that traces out an arc of agony through the embroidered void of the room, emerging from the upper floor. Andrei runs, leaping up the steps two by two. Right or left? A small radiance, a fleeting twinkle, straight ahead. It’s the flame of a candle or its reflection on golden skin, which all at once fades away into a myriad of violet lights, the moon of a mirror attached to the wardrobe door, which as it slowly opens reveals them tangled and naked in bed. Alicia sees him and says only: “Andrei.” Martha Velin coldly comments: “This is not real,” behind the back of the man who flees the house, sprints down the street, abandons Amsterdam.
