The Dissertation, page 10
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
Around the turn of the century, Dr. Grillo inherited a twelve-room house in the Calle Danton del Valle and a good income. He sold all the furniture except a bed, the dining table, and its fourteen chairs. Then he bought similar tables for the other rooms and had the walls shelved floor to ceiling. The shelves filled up with books, the tables with his notes. He had an illiterate mestiza to sweep the floors, cook rice, and do his laundry. For about twenty years he kept an illiterate indian woman, whom he visited three nights a week at midnight. One night he knocked and got no answer, went home, slept soundly, and never felt a sexual urge40 again. He saw his mother for an hour every Sunday. Sometimes he ran into a brother or a stray niece or cousin. That was the total of his contact with the human species. His only true communication was with himself.
Dr. Grillo rose each day at six, took coffec, worked till noon, ate and siesta’d, rose and worked till six, ate and worked till close to midnight. Work meant reading and note-taking; or sitting in thought, his long, transparent fingers pressed against closed eyelids, his elbows wading in his notes, or wandering from room to room, from shelf to shelf, from worktable to worktable, letting past or projected studies play in the front of his mind while, in the back, his current thoughts combined and recombined in varying order. Sometimes he’d turn up a decaying sheet of paper, scan it, and smile bow clever and absurd he’d been to glimpse an insight which now, after thirty years’ more reading, he knew had been captured and tamed long centuries before by other men on distant continents. Sometimes a thought would seize his interest, and he’d sit down and work a month or two there at that table. He always had a line of study going; his mind was always open to divergent possibilities. October torrents beat upon his roof and splashed the tiles below his open windows; dry-season breezes rearranged his notes and turned the vellum pages of his dictionaries. On the morning of 6th September, 1905, as he was trying to decide what Dante meant by “sacra fame” (Purgatory, XXII: 40), U.S. Marines entered the city to depose President Amado del Busto and, getting some sniper fire from del Busto’s brother, who lived next door, sent a trigger-happy hail of rifle bullets through the doctor’s window, past his head, and on into the ceiling. Dr. Grillo pushed his notes away and considered for a moment the relative expediency of continuing his work versus taking shelter beneath the table. But the philological problem so insisted itself that, in a matter of seconds, he lost interest in the fusillade outside, forgot the danger to his person, composed his notes, and wrote: “Surely Dante could not deem the hunger for gold sacred. Perhaps he used ‘sacra’ here as we so often use ‘sagrado’ and the French their ‘sacre,’ ironically, so that it makes a synonym for ‘damned.’ That was as close as he ever came to letting his work be interrupted by current events.
Although he lived almost entirely in his mind, Dr. Grillo conciliated his body with a two-kilometer walk each night before he went to bed. Like Kant’s through Königsberg, his itinerary never varied. In the three decades that he made these walks, however, some items changed. He aged, for one thing. One of his favorite streets became a slum. A world depression reached Tinieblas, putting men out of work and into crime. Just after midnight, then, on 12th November, 1931, as he was striding toward Bolivar Plaza in his white linen suit (yellowed at the lapels and with jacket pockets stuffed with notes), Panama hat (brim turned down all the way around), and patent leather shoes (worn sockless in a losing fight against toe fungus), directing with his right hand an imaginary chamber orchestra in a rehearsal of a Vivaldi flute concerto and tugging with his left now at his moustache, now at his white beard, two hoodlums dragged him to an alley, knocked him senseless with a piece of pipe, and stole the two inchados seventeen centavos he had on him. He came to forty minutes later face up in the dirt and since it was a clear night with the heavens bulged with stars and meteors, was at once reminded of a problem in astrophysics he had been pondering some years before and had abandoned still unsettled. Now, amazingly, the solution4l seemed almost within his grasp, and as the night was warm, his head unbloodied if a little sore, and his position not uncomfortable, he lay there revolving equations in his mind. He was still there two hours later when León Fuertes pranced into the alley en route to the back window of a girl he knew.
“Time to go home, grandfather,” said León, who was willing to postpone pleasure for the reward he could expect for getting this upper-class drunk to bed. He bent to grab an arm.
“I’ve got it!” Dr. Grillo wrenched his arm away.
“I’ve got it too; no matter. The whores say if you give it to a virgin it’ll go away.” He bent for the other arm.
“No.” Dr. Grillo shook his head absently. “I’ll have to work it out on paper. “
“Good for you, if you can do it. But come on. You can’t sleep here. Someone’ll rob you.”
“Someone already has,” said Dr. Grillo, getting to his feet, and here the course of history and heaven knows how many lives, my own included, hung in the balance, for León was not so philanthropic as to assist the penniless, nor Dr. Grillo so insightful as to discover León’s worth without the help of science. But Dr. Grillo didn’t have his balance and, seeking it, placed a thin palm on León’s head, thereby reactivating an interest in the science of phrenology, which had absorbed him for the best part of the year 1908. Amazing! Here was a mirror wherein shone all Spurzheim’s theories of the signs of genius!
“Quit groping my head, old fag!”
“Be still, young fool!” It was one thing for Dr. Grillo when Max Planck ignored his commentaries, another to be insulted by a guttersnipe, and since the doctor rarely spoke to anyone except himself, even more rarely used the imperative mode, and hadn’t raised his voice in forty years, his tone carried authority. León stood still while Dr. Grillo palped his cranium, then while the doctor stepped back to regard him, while both were, in their turn, regarded by the stars.
“Have you parents?”
“My mother.”
“Is she at home?”
“You think she’s some kind of streetwalker?”
“At present I am not thinking. I am ascertaining points of fact. Is she at home?”
León nodded.
“Are you ambitious? That is, do you want to improve yourself?”
“I want more.”
“More of what?”
“More.”
It was Dr. Grillo’s turn to nod “Take me to your mother.”
When my grandmother Rebeca Fuertes heard the door snap shut behind León and Dr. Grillo, she woke not just from sleep but from her decade-long depressive trance. For the first time in ten years she felt a pressure in her bladder without fearing the malevolence of Dr. Azael Burlando’s ghost and gazed out at the heavens without fearing that the dawn would turn her black, but since, in this life, no problem melts without another swelling up to take its place, she remembered her transgressed duties to my father’s destiny and found her soul encased in the loose flab of guilt. She might, in fact, have asked León his pardon when he came in to say they had a visitor, except that in my family—and in Tinieblas generally—we don’t ask pardon because we don’t forgive. She did resolve to make up for her neglect, not realizing how soon her chance would come.
“What can I offer you?” She asked Dr. Escolástico Grillo when she came out from the bedroom wrapped in the same lobstered silk kimono she ‘d bought in Shanghai seventeen years before.
Dr. Grillo raised himself two inches off the straight-backed wooden chair and hung there until Rebeca had sat down opposite him across the oilclothed wooden table. During the interview that followed he continued to furl and unfurl his pliant white sombrero while León leaned against the sink, examining the new person his mother had become.
“Your son,” said Dr. Grillo.
“I suppose you mean to pay me ten gold sovereigns? Or has the price gone down?”
Dr. Grillo sighed. “It is obvious, señora …”
“Senorita. Señorita Rebeca Fuertes.”
“It is obvious, señorita, that you misconstrue my aims. I do not care to buy your son, even if that were possible.”
“I don’t know, señor …”
“Doctor. Doctor Escolástico Grillo. At your orders,” he added, already exhausted by so much conversation.
“Doctor, then. I don’t know what world you live in …”
“I live as far as possible in the world of ideal forms.”
“That explains it. In this world”—Rebeca’s glance took in the squalid room, the cracks between the warped boards of the walls, the damp wash drooping from a wire strung across a corner, the squad of glossy roaches mustered beneath the stove in the oil lamp’s penumbra—”people are bought and sold each day.”
“I have studied sociology. It does not particularly interest me at present. A little while ago I had occasion—accidental, may I add, to make a very cursory examination of your son’s cranium. I found configurations that, according to the science of phrenology, show strength of concentration and diverse other talents. I should like to conduct experiments to substantiate or refute these indications. Since this requires a controlled environment, I will give him board and lodging. I will pay him five inchados weekly for his time. Should my experiments tend to substantiate the indications …”
“They will.”
“… then I might undertake to educate him.”
“You are a teacher?”
“I have never taught anyone except myself. On the other hand, I am the most learned man on this continent. I would continue to give board and lodging. I would pay nothing, but neither would I charge a fee. All this, of course, is contingent upon the results of the experiments and your son’s complete cooperation. I think he has the makings of a scholar.”
“He is going to be President of the Republic.”
“I shall not be able to teach him how to lie.”
“He knows already. León, do you accept?”
León fished up a pack of Camels, shook one out, lit up, blew smoke, and nodded slowly. “Put Pepe to work. Or go yourself. I need a vacation.”
My father’s “vacation” lasted four years, eleven months, and seven days. It was a term of fierce and unremitting mental effort, but first to last and, later on, in retrospect, he saw it as a holiday: not simply as a furlough from the struggle for existence but as a time when he owed service only to his talents. When he arrived at Dr. Grillo’s house, he got a washtub full of water and some soap. Later he got a medical examination and the first treatment of an irrigation cure for gonorrhea. He got a meal, a hammock, and ten minutes of hypnosis, which established him on a diurnal schedule. The next morning he got the first in a series of tests which continued seven hours a day, seven days a week, for seven weeks, until the Feast of the Epiphany: Dr. Grillo dealt out ten playing cards face up at poker speed, then bunched and turned them and asked León to recite the order; León did so without an error rather more briskly than they had been dealt. Dr. Grillo noted the results, shuffled, and dealt out half the pack. Such tests of visual memory crescendo’d in difficulty through several days until Dr. Grillo presented León with a full-sized reproduction of the center panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, permitted him to study it for three minutes, then took the work to a far corner of the room. (They were in what once bad been an upstairs sitting room, a small but well-lit room, which gave on the patio and from whose worktable Dr. Grillo had removed all former notes.) He asked León to describe it in detail; León’s reply consumed two hours. He blocked out the picture like a chessboard and told off the contents of each quadrant, h8 to al, rattling on without a pause, though Dr. Grillo began to moan “Enough!” when he was five-eighths done.
León was similarly impressive in the tests of aural memory that followed. He sang back Puccini’s aria “Che gelida manina” (which Dr. Grillo played him twice in a Caruso disc) with perfect pitch and diction, though he confessed that while the language sounded like Castilian, he couldn’t understand it. He performed other feats (which, incidentally, showed a massive gift for music), such as recording, separating, and then humming back all the orchestral voices of R. Wagner’s Tristan chord, until at length, seeking a limit to his memory, Dr. Grillo read him the first chapter of the Book of Genesis in Hebrew and received, to mingled joy and terror, a faultless playback.
Using both hands, Dr. Grillo poured out a dram of Cardenal Mendoza brandy from the decanter that he now kept on a corner of the table. He drank it off, shook himself like a doused dog, then glanced across to León. “Can you recall,” he asked in an offhand way, “the ten cards I dealt you on our first day three weeks ago?”
León shot him a grin like that captured in the barman’s photo. “Old fox!”
“You can’t remember!”
“Hold on. I’ve got them. I’ve just got to go get them.”
And while the doctor rummaged for his first notebook, León threw his hands over his face and pressed his brow and squeezed out the first card and then the second and then all the rest, the last ones fluttering forth quite easily.
“You keep it all, then? The Bosch picture and the Puccini aria, and the passage from the Costaguanan penal code? You keep whatever goes in?”
“I guess so,” said León. “I don’t think about it. But I can get it if I need it.”
“I think,” said Dr. Grillo, groping for the decanter, “we’d best wait until tomorrow before going on.”
They moved to problems in logical deduction.
“Quesada, Quemada, and Quebrada,” Dr. Grillo might say, “are a physicist, a physician, and a philosopher, though not necessarily in that order. Quemada earns more than Quesada. Quesada has never heard of Quemada. The physicist earns more than the philosopher. The philosopher tried to get the physician to treat charity patients, but he refused because he was engaged in research with the physicist. Who is who?”
And León would relax and close his eyes and let the bits of information fall in place and, outwardly calm, work it out—without pencil and paper, of course, because he couldn’t write—and give the answer.
When Dr. Grillo had exhausted his invention constructing problems that León never failed to solve, he passed to uttering Delphic solutions for which León then provided problems. Through all this period of trial, which saw Dr. Grillo greatly expand his intake of Cardenal Mendoza brandy and sometimes even lose his temper, León cooperated with immense good cheer, out of delight in exercising new-found talents and from an urge to please, astound, and captivate his audience. On 6th January, 1932, having determined Spurzheim’s theories proved as far as any single case could prove them and León’s gifts worthy of any teacher, Dr. Grillo declared the experiment complete and began formal instruction.
The curriculum of my father’s education was in the main conventional. He learned to read with ease and penetration, to write with clarity and grace. He learned French and Italian, since Dr. Grillo kept a monopoly on Greek and Latin, while Rebeca vetoed any study of English. He studied chemistry and physics, mathematics through the calculus, literature from Homer to Proust, social thought from Plato to Ortega. More original was Dr. Grillo’s use of history to neutralize the centrifugal pull of disciplines. He built my father’s course like an orchestral score, the strings of poetry, the horns of science, the tympani of war sounding their interacting blended themes along the staves of time. This laudable approach made León see things whole, although his native urge was to simplify by separating. In recitation, in argument, and in the papers that he wrote, León forever strove to sever science from religion, math from music, polities from poetry and, generally, to unweave Dr. Grillo’s integrated tapestry into its separate threads, just as, in later life, he chose to be a number of separate men, each with a separate worldview, style, career, persona, and collection of accomplices, each fully formed and native to a special habitat, each different and distinct from all the rest, rather than be a single, integrated human.
Besides this act of rebellion, which scarcely disturbed Dr. Grillo since everyone worth teaching rebels against his teachers one way or another, León disappointed Dr. Grillo in one respect: learning was not the be-all or the end-all of his life. He could lose himself in study for a time, seal himself up hermetically in books or composition. He learned voraciously. Knowledge and competence were part of the “more” he wanted. They were certainly important means to get more of that “more.” But he did not revere learning for its own sake or find more than a fleeting satisfaction in it. It was the same for him later on with music, sport, and the celebrity these brought him, with comradeship in war and polities, with respectability, with wealth, with power, with the planetary system of disciples, sycophants, girl friends, and relatives (adoring wife and kids of course included) that revolved about him in firmly programmed orbits bound by his gravity and magnetism with life itself. He found no moments of fulfillment, but rather interruptions of his hunger.
Dr. Grillo included in his course of instruction one peculiar, nonacademic element: from the onset he nurtured León in techniques of auto-hypnosis and yoga so that he gained phenomenal control over his mind and body. It was not just that León soon rid himself forever of dependence on tobacco or that, three decades later, during his state visit to Canada, he could win a wager and impress a crowd by ordering a hole sawed in the ice of Lac Saint Charles, stripping to briefs, and splashing merrily for some three minutes. Wounded by mortar fragments during the assault on Pico, in the last phase of the Battle of Cassino, León stanched the flow of an internal hemorrhage by mental force alone, a trick few fakirs have in their repertoires. Similarly, he was able to block his mind into compartments and thereby keep his several lives and persons separate. More, he was proof against the seductions of appetite and attraction—or, put another way, he lacked the average fellow’s grand excuse that such and such an urge was irresistible. My father never fell; rather he dived.
