The Dissertation, page 13
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
Why did he never forge what the psychoanilinguists call an “integrated personality”? He wanted more. He realized that an identity is limiting, while the possibilities of life are infinite. He chose not to deprive himself and had the energy and courage of his choice. Rather than stuff a wardrobe of different attitudes, each suited to a different life, into one groaning personality—which personality gets bulged all out of shape while loose ends dangle messily (an artist’s ego, say, fouling the mesh of teamwork on a ballfield)—he contrived a different personality for each different life and kept each separate. (Cf. Zeus Gynomachos, who chose a feathered tenderness for Leda and for Europa lusty taurine thrusts.) He constructed a number of worlds within this world, and denizens of one learned that they blundered to another only at their peril. Or, if you like, he had no personality, was by nature protean and undefined, felt himself liable to slip from avatar to avatar without control, and hence invented characters (attending to the details of each one so that they would not merge) and played them out, taking what care he could not to get publics and supporting casts mixed up, nor to be caught uncostumed in the dressing room.
11. Love
IN AUGUST, 1936, there washed up on the Caribbean littoral of Tinieblas the wreckage of a Spanish operetta company, a restless, zestless group who traipsed the provinces of Spain and the less cultured regions of America giving zarzuelas and Castilian versions of The Merry Widow and The Count of Luxembourg. The impresario, a certain Lépido Perron,53 who besides handling business matters sang bass baritone and managed things backstage, possessed great gifts of stubbornness and self-deception. He thought his shows surpassed the most entrancing spectacles of Paris or New York, and he argued with such pitiless insistence that he was able to extract more than his company was worth from theater owners. The ladies of the company used as much make up off the stage as on, showed a great deal of leg and bosom, distilled a pungent promise of sophisticated sin. They drew the burghers and sometimes furnished the more generous of them horizontal as well as vertical diversions. The men wore permanent sneers, tight-fitting double-breasted suits, and high-heeled pointytoed elastic-sided ankle boots; their hands were dazzled with cheap rings, their hair was slicked down to a carbon-paper gloss. They were as adept at casual theft as at extorting from the ladies (either by pain or pleasure) a portion of the burghers’ generosity. In short, the troupe survived, or did until General Francisco Franco raised the Morocco Tercio and sent the Spanish people tripping out to civil war.
The company was in Honduras at the time, in San Pedro Sula to be exact, banana country. The tenor had sung so many heroic roles that he had come to think himself a man of courage. He embarked at once for Spain to fight for the republic, taking his leading lady, the baritone’s wife, along. The baritone drank himself out of voice, and the company’s repertoire was thus reduced to a zarzuela called La Gran Via, in which Perron could sing the lead. As a firm capitalist (if more in aspiration than reality) he sided with General Franco and quarreled with the mezzo, a spirited catalana whose brothers were anarcho-syndicalists. On stage one night they took to hissing insults at each other until his face came so to infuriate her that she slapped it violently three times and then exited in tears through an archway painted on the backdrop, taking the set with her. The audience demanded its money; the theater owner sued for his receipts and huge imaginary damages; Perron found his properties attached and his company enmired in a swamp of writs. Idleness wreaked further injury. The most accomplished dancer accepted an offer of concubinage from the manager of a fruit plantation. Some members of the chorus became involved in a café discussion, voiced insufficient joy over the communist coup in Barcelona, and were set upon by banana workers and badly beaten. As a result of this incident all members of the company were hailed into police headquarters and interrogated as possible extremist agitators. A routine search of their hotel rooms revealed among the second lead’s belongings a quantity of silverware from the home of the Spanish Vice-Consul, their only friend in town. Thus dispatched of costumes, properties, and his best artists, bayed at by lawyers and policemen, robbed of all hope of comfort from his consulate, Perron gathered a remnant of his company about him and decamped in secret to Puerto Cortés, where they took deck passage on the first ship that was sailing. After two days and nights of rain and seasickness, they landed at Bastidas.
There the disintegration of the company continued. Two of the men found and snatched a chance to work their way to Argentina on a Swedish tramp. A third established himself as business manager for two of the ladies, who, as the most sprightly pair of mounts along that coast, raised their passage back to Europe in a few months. Meantime Perron and the two remaining ladies made their way over to Ciudad Tinieblas, where they were engaged for a pittance at the Jacaranda.
Lépido Perron was a year or two under fifty, short-legged, thick-jowled, and barrel-chested. His eyebrows bushed temple to temple without a break; his hair shagged dankly to his collar; his ears and nostrils were luxuriantly tufted. He had tiny, narrow-set black eyes and a very few ideas, all of them false, which he held with unshakable conviction. He believed, for example, that he was, an artistic and commercial genius, that Stalin was a Jew and Christ a Spaniard, and that women ought best be classed among the animals because they lacked immortal souls. He was vain, truculent, and boastful, at best a minus seven on the Fuertes Scale (see note 12).
The women he appeared with at the Jacaranda—and he appeared excessively, belching his numbers earnestly while strutting back and forth about the stage—were, in order of seniority, his mistress and his wife. The former, a sevillana possibly part gypsy who called herself Natalia de Triana, was about ten years younger than Perron, short and heavy-breasted. In the right lighting she achieved a kind of whorish elegance which she considered beauty. Her voice was alto and (to middle-aged provincials well along in drink) seductive. It seemed to promise—and the promise was fulfilled to those with coin to test it—an appetite for vice. She had been with Perron for twenty years, was In all ways his temperamental equal, and loathed him as intensely as he detested her, although (perhaps because) each was incurably dependent on the other for the indulgence of certain particularly swinish habits.
Perron’s wife, Rosario, was something else entirely: she was lovely, honest, and eighteen. Her loveliness was head-turning, breath-taking, traffic-stopping—heart-breaking ultimately, for she seemed to every man who saw her the incarnation of his private dream of woman. Her legs were long and graceful, her body slim and voluptuous. Her dark hair tumbled softly past her shoulders; her brilliant eyes laughed easily; her warm mouth asked no rouge. Her walk broadcast such sensuality that café mashers, louts who pissed their days away leering at every nubile female who went by and hissing out degrading invitations, gaped hang-jawed and mute until she passed, while their unguided robot hands continued to spoon sugar into gummy cups or pour wine into overflowing glasses. Ice-hearted womanizers blew all self-control over Rosario and often finished permanently maimed. Don Horacio Ladilla, for example, was the acknowledged master cocksman of Tinieblas, a man who boasted with conviction that he consumed more women than he did cigars and who, more or less as a hobby, built and stocked the richest brothel in the continent and kept it closed on Tuesdays for his private delectation. He offered Rosario de Perron two thousand inchados, an unheard-of sum, for one hour of her charms, and when she told him she did not make love for money, cried like a punished child. She took pity on him and went the next afternoon to the suite he kept at the Hotel Excelsior, but the sight of her naked struck him impotent, an affliction he had never known before and which she treated with such tenderness and gaiety that from then on he was capable of manhood only by casting her image on the screen of his closed eyelids and calling all his paramours Rosario.
Unlike so many truly striking women, Rosario neither feared her power over men nor let it turn her cruel or conceited, and yet a different class of men from Don Horacio, wiser men, better bred, romantics, if you like, who kept a chivalrous regard for womankind, found in her their princesse lointaine and, although much allured by her and certainly not frightened of her husband, revered her spiritually and were content to take a passive pleasure in her freshness and her love of life. Dr. Alonso Gusano, whom Rosario consulted on her first day in Ciudad Tinieblas, went every evening to the Jacaranda and entertained her with great opulence between her numbers, but when a waggish friend asked if he’d not been putting his examination table to a double use, Gusano, who besides being a respected surgeon was a fairly decent amateur violinist, replied frankly and a little sadly that, professional ethics aside, he had no more right to make love to Rosario than he did to play Auer’s Stradivarius. She marked men deeply, and they wondered what she was doing married to Perron, where he had found her, how he’d captured her, and why she stayed with him.
Perron had bought her outright for a hundred Ticamalan pesos when she was ten years old. This was in November, 1927, during his company’s first tour of Central America. There was a piece then in their repertoire with a child’s part, and Perron would cast it locally. He would announce an opportunity for a gifted little girl to perform on the same stage with internationally acclaimed artists. Then he’d hold an audition, choose a kid, and pay her parents with a pair of tickets. And since families tend to be large and loyal in our part of the world, he’d like as not sell a good dozen more to relatives. The system had drawbacks, though. The brats were trouble to rehearse since he could neither beat nor curse them, and it was a rare one who could last her quarter hour on the stage without bumbling a line or stumbling against the set or fumbling in her nose while someone was singing. So when the theater porter in Puerto Guineo offered him Rosario, whom he would have in his control and who was so talented that he expected he would make his fortune on her, Perron decided to give up renting kids and buy instead.
She wasn’t the porter’s child; she didn’t even know her parents. She’d had a foster mother who one afternoon left her at the theater for a silent-movie matinee and never came back. In continuing along the street, the woman had the misfortune to pass a cantina at the precise moment when two citizens, the best of buddies actually, who had been drinking rum together all day long, tried to annihilate each other with their pistols and succeeded only in making Rosario an orphan for the second time. The porter’s wife took her in, and after two years of watching films and vaudeville every day Rosario could mimic Clara Bow and Chaplin, sing all the hit boleros from Havana, tell risqué stories, juggle fruit, and do flamenco heel-stomp. Perron caught her act—done in the alleyway beside the theater for an audience of urchins —and was impressed. The porter was tired of feeding an extra mouth, and when the company left town, Rosario went with it.
She took to the roving life with ease, became the mascot of the company, but never made Perron rich. There was a kind of casualness in her that stepped between her talent and its commercial exploitation. It was not that she lacked energy. She made their travels bright with wisecracks, pranks, and ad-lib entertainments, aped members of the troupe, burlesqued this one’s delivery of a song and that one’s style of dancing, put out hilarious, mock-innocent commentary on their ever-shifting amorous entanglements, but no matter how Perron might howl at her, she loafed during rehearsals and often gave only the minimum on stage. She preferred life to art and refused to act like a professional—a refusal that, in due course, she extended to her love life.
Perron initiated her himself when she was fourteen, responding to the only moral imperative he recognized—i.e., he might as well, since if he didn’t someone else would. Rosario experienced no trauma. Much the reverse; she was pleased by the sensation and by the docility that overcame Perron, temporarily, to be sure, but regularly whenever the operation was repeated. She soon learned it could be even more fun with other men, but unlike the other ladies of the company, she neither asked nor accepted payment. When, on her return from her first assignation, Perron, in the tradition of the troupe, slapped her about and then demanded his cut, she explained as to an infant that since she’d picked the man herself and enjoyed him thoroughly, money hadn’t figured in the episode. When Perron realized at last that she was telling him the truth, he concluded she was feeble-minded and undertook to prostitute her himself. Rosario not only balked but threatened so vehemently to set the law on him that he took the precaution of marrying her, a step that infuriated la Triana and with which Rosario went along out of good nature. It cost her nothing and calmed the impresario. In the same spirit she went to bed with him from time to time and permitted him illusions of possession. That is, she lied whenever she made love with someone else, cooking up the most blasphemous protestations of chastity and smiling sweetly while he gulped them like communion wafers. There was no dishonesty in this. The lies she put out to excuse her absences were too outrageous to constitute deception. Like all good women, Rosario tried to please men where she could, and so she furnished Perron the necessary equipment to deceive himself. Meantime she stayed with the company because staying was as easy as leaving, did at all times exactly as she pleased, had many lovers, both platonic and otherwise, to whom she gave affection, tenderness, and joy, but never chanced to fall in love54 herself. In fact, except for what she’d seen in others, she knew no more of love than León Fuertes did. Then, five or six nights after she and la Triana and Perron began performing at the Jacaranda, León came in to sing.
Since love is nowhere studied systematically—and it’s the only universal human pastime that is not—no data are available on the incidence of mutual true first love at first sight. One feels, however, such occurrences are rare. Love is a common enough form of monomania—an intense and narrow enfocation of the mind upon a particular object, usually human, and the consequent formation of a psychological (and, sometimes, physical) dependence which binds one to the object forcefully and leads one to invest the object with a great importance, even more importance than one gives oneself. But since one can (and often does) contract love repeatedly, first love (the primary affliction) is less common. As love often develops gradually—e.g., a benign growth of gratitude metastasizes from the pelvis to the brain and runs malignant—love at first sight, where one is seized with the condition instantaneously upon eye contact with the object, figures to be of a higher order of improbability. True love is the disease in its acute form. Here the obsession is profound, pronounced, and (relatively) proof against the eroding effects of space and time and the distractions55 posed by other potential objects. All the pathologists of love concur in true love’s rarity. Finally, mutual love involves two individuals in a reflected and reverberating dymania, the object of an obsession being simultaneously possessed of a more or less equally severe obsession for the subject of the first. It is a very unicorn in the bestiary of emotions. Nonetheless, as soon as León shooed Perron down from the stage and mounted there himself with his musicians, he saw Rosario, who sat ringside with Dr. Gusano, and she saw him, and each felt instantly, acutely, for the first time, and relative to the other that absurd confusion of joy and sorrow, peace and longing, languor and excitement, possessiveness and generosity, liberty and bondage which the English language eloquently links with loss of balance: they fell in love. And since both León and Rosario were willful, brave, proud, confident, and free, they at once abandoned themselves to their love, so that from the onset there was no arresting its course or alleviating its symptoms.
Parapsychology is now a recognized science, but it as yet provides no firm statistics on the incidence of two-way extrasensory perception. Here again, however, we may assume improbability, for such perception is not truly extra sensory at all but rather hangs upon a sense all humans have but which few own to or employ. Reading another’s thoughts is seen as freakish; ergo, it must be rare. For two people to read each other’s must be rarer. Nonetheless, the moment their eyes met—eyes singularly alike in color, depth, and brilliance—Rosario and León, neither of whom had ever telepathed before, knew one another’s thoughts, not as vague hints but as if each were whispering his mind into the other’s ear. León was, for example, specifically aware that the unknown, delicious female at his feet wanted to suck his lip almost until it bled, whereas Rosario realized that Le6n, whose name Dr. Gusano had just told her, craved to repay that favor in more meridional regions. A microsecond later each knew the other knew, both blushed, yet neither looked away. Instead each offered free and full assurance that he would that same night and for all nights to come be at the other’s disposition for the calming of all wants and cravings. Then, happy to have this problem solved so speedily and simply, they smiled.
With that Rosario became aware that León wished to sing a song for her, and León was at once in mind of a popular paso doble whose lyric he had never really known until that moment, so he held up his hands to the audience, which was growing impatient as well as larger, with people beating on their tables and others hurrying in off the street, and spoke over his shoulder to his musicians, who strummed up an introduction, and began to sing, first to the audience in general and then directly to Rosario. During the verse, which told in superdramatic Spanish fashion of a bullfighter who sees a lady in the crowd and straight off offers her his cape, his heart, et cetera, he received from Rosario, who was watching him with great pride and tenderness, a number of messages: the suggestion that he try an Andalusian accent (lisped z’s and c’s, slurred d’s, dropped s’s), the news that she would like to share the stage with him (he wished he’d thought of that himself), and the plan for a joint number. He agreed to all, of course, sang the chorus as if she were the only person in the room, and in the four-measure break before the second verse, bowed to her and helped her to the stage with an exaggerated gallantry which they both laughed at inwardly while holding very stern Iberian frowns. Then Rosario danced, body and face immobile, heels and castanets aclatter, and León sang, posturing like a bullfighter and drawing her past him back and forth with his spread hand, until the song closed with her whirling at the far end of the stage, her long dress flowered out above her knees, and him half turned toward her, back arched, chin lifted, hand above his head. The audience suffered hysterics of applause.
