The Dissertation, page 37
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
Ritual reconnaissance was then conducted at a roadhouse cocktail bar, across its dance floor, and in the car. I discovered that my companion’s name was Elizabeth Cleaver, that she was majoring in English literature, that she eschewed brassieres (this is all germane, Professor Lilywhite) and had healthy Bartholins. Our pairings—determined, let the record show, without my participation—were deemed acceptable. Liz and Adana marched chastely into their dorm precisely at midnight. Twelve minutes thereafter Whitbread and I sneaked in through a fire door opened by the girls. (Romantic Sig would, doubtless, have us scrambling up the ivy and through a moon-drenched casement, but I am constrained to historical accuracy.) A moment later Liz bolted the door to her cubicle behind the two of us.
And straightaway grew nervous, turned her mouth away, asked me if I had anything to smoke. I hadn’t, but there happened to be a tea bag of dried flor de sueño blossoms in my watch pocket. It acts slowly and, unlike cannabis, does not particularly banish inhibitions, vestigial Puritanism, fear of poor performance, etc., but wanting somehow to dispel her tension and counting on a placebo effect, I used her electric hot plate to brew us an infusion. We sipped this quickly from a Princeton beer mug which we passed back and forth, I perched on the straight chair beside her book-strewn desk, she cross-legged on her narrow bed beneath her art nouveau peace poster. Since I had been well primed since morning, since she imagined a relaxing glow the drug does not confer, since we were both young and sound, attracted to each other, and fresh from an hour’s fumbling in the back of Whitbread’s car, we were soon tearing at each other’s lips and clothing. When I entered her, she had just time to assure me she was on the pill before commencing a grand clasping come that gurgled on through the some ninety seconds it took me to catch up. As in the Elizabethan theater, we proceeded through acts two, three, four, and five without intermission. Then (I approach the point, good Dr. Grimes), as we lay tumbled in the wake of love, side by side, her head on my left shoulder, her right leg over my left thigh, both gazing at the ceiling (spotlit by the yellow circle from her study lamp), the drug kicked in.
Liz, I learned later, had a Shakespeare quiz scheduled for the morning; she was no doubt unconsciously preoccupied by it. I have never been far from Tinieblas in my inmost thoughts. Our souls were still dueting in the receding echoes of shared pleasure. We were never closer, though we have been love and torment to each other for almost four years, wife and husband for almost three. This is how I explain our blended vision of the past. The circle on the ceiling fuzzed like a TV screen, then focused on the London tavern scene described in text above. I recognized the poet from his portraits but (I am ashamed to admit) had to ask Liz later who Prosper was. Liz knew the boatswain for one of Drake’s men but was bewildered as to what part of the world he was storying. Together, then, we glimpsed the incident that links Shakespeare to Tinieblas, binds Mituco up with Prospero’s strange island, stitches the fabric of my father’s life onto the stuff of dreams, and melds my history with art’s insubstantial pageant. I could never have accomplished that piece of research on my own, and I shall love Liz always for her help with it. This I vow firmly, though it is past two in the morning and the bitch is still not home.
7. Teachers hired in Europe
Among them the symbolist poet Jacinthe Malhaleine, who spent three years on Mituco and remembered it in three lines (518-520) of his self-portrait in verse, “Orages”:
Ensuite, je fit un bel exil
Tout mariné de rêves subtils
Au paradis des crocodiles.
It is the round-nosed caiman, of course (not the rhyming Egyptian crocodile), that abounds in Mituco and many other regions of Tinieblas and is our heraldic national animal. This slimed and indolent beast lacks the majesty of Britain’s lion and the alert intelligence of France’s cock, but (poaching gringos be warned) has a heavy tail, and most sharp teeth, and snapping jaws which crush and maim and kill.
8. Rebeca
The principal source for this and the following three chapters is Rebeca Fuertes herself. I heard expurgated versions of her autobiography when, as a child, I would sit with her in her red-roofed bungalow beside the Alameda park while my brother, Carlos, romped on the ball field. My grandmother would receive me like any other gentleman caller, nodding me to the wicker chair beside her hide-backed rocker, having her maid serve me a glass of chicha de tamarindo, inquiring after my family, and then interrupting my reply with research of lost time. I knew her as a blobbish ancient dame with sagging jowls who sprawled kimono’d in a rocker scuffling her sandals on the floor tiles, but her eyes, like jewels found in a ruin, made credible her claim to vanished splendor, while her stories, like those of Scheherazade, were entrancing, even in a children’s edition. She lived well into her eighty-eighth year, long enough to see two sons elected president, one assassinated, the other impeached, and recaptured the past in the final hour of the uremia that killed her. The delirium of her illness repealed six decades and transformed her hospital bed with its debris of tubes and needles into a divan in a brothel of Tsinan. She took me for some rich lover, and sighed with such sweet languor, “Amène-moi en Europe; je te ferai heureux,” that I learned once and for all that the main substance of our life is memory. In that moment I conceived this history.
Since her “death” my grandmother has visited me some twelve or fifteen times, clarifying many details of her own life and my father’s. Like him, she has been accepted for Performing Arts and advanced to stellar roles. They are, in fact, now trying to arrange a performance of Gounod’s Faust in which he will sing the lead and she dance the adagio in the fifth act ballet.
I have resolved to compose two chapters of this dissertation every month, and I have begun those dealing with my grandmother’s life on schedule. Not without difficulties, however, thanks to my dear wife. Oh, no, prying examiners! You will get no details. This is not one of Siggy’s novels, all sloshed with overflowing ordure from the author’s private life. I mention difficulties merely to document my scholarly dedication. But I should ask the skeptic—and there are always skeptics, clods who grunt smugly as if to say, “He was probably to blame anyway”—whether it is unreasonable for a man to question a wife who returns from the movies a full four hours after the film has ended; whether it is abnormal for such a man to wax a bit annoyed, not to say furious, when such a wife, far from responding to polite inquiry, flounces by without a glance and, humming gaily, bolts herself in her bedroom; whether it is truly reprehensible for that man to kick the door in, splintering the panel and tearing the bolt screws from the molding; and whether it is fair for the wife, upon observing that, in the process, he has gashed his ankle cruelly, to cackle in glee instead of showing sympathy. Does Toynbee have to bear this? Was Gibbon thus tormented? Did Tacitus have his repose mangled in brawling? Was Thucydides forced to work with an aching heart and a throbbing ankle? I doubt it. But I too have been chosen for a bringer of order. I too accept that fate. And I shall make my history despite all interference and all obstacles.
9. Gauguin and L’Isle-Adam
The gentlemen with whom Don Patricio Garza associated in Belle Époque Paris need no introduction. The ladies shared the fate of the boatswain mentioned in Chapter 1 in that they served as raw material for a verbal universe-maker, in their case Marcel Proust. I have this on the authority of my wife, Elizabeth Cleaver Fuertes, B.A., whose Thornchasm College senior seminar (Comp. Lit. 414) provided a kind of scorecard with the “real life” equivalents of Proust’s personages. Such information is, of course, about as valuable for an understanding of Á la recherche du temps perdu as, say, the balance sheet of the firm that milled the paper for the Pléiade edition, but at least it comes in handy here. A more polluting effusion from the seminar is a questionnaire supposedly elaborated by Proust as an aid to constructing characters. Reborn as a parlor game, it contributed to the difficulties that I am presently enduring, that I have hinted at already in note 8, and that my examiners must know more of if they are to arrive at a sentient evaluation of this dissertation.
I completed my course work at Sunburst at the end of quarter I, 1973-1974, in other words during the second week in December, 1973. It remained for me to write this dissertation, and as the cost of living is lower and the surroundings more favorable for research in Tinieblas than in Florida, my wife and I came here at once. Barely were we settled in when she informed me that she was having some friends over. Where she had got friends from I could not imagine. I have no friends. It turned out that she referred to people she had met at the Instituto Tinieblino-Norteamericano, a cultural center supported by the United States Information Service, where she had found work teaching English. She managed to fill out rattan set, six aluminum chairs kidnapped from the dinette, and a good portion of out living room floor with them. Most of the names, faces, and affectations have, happily, faded from my memory, but I recall a Mr. Pismire, who had something to do with the administration of the Instituto, his companion, a stridently undeodorized young Frenchwoman, and a hairdresser student of Liz’s who turned out to be catamite to one of General Manduco’s bodyguards. The star attraction was the novelist Sig Heilanstalt, who was about to take up his Fulbright duties at the National University. I don’t know if Liz invited him personally or if Pismire brought him, but he sprawled on the chaise like the entrails the old Teutons hung on fir trees, stroking his beard and soaking up attention. At about eleven he made as if to rise; I smiled for the first time in the evening, and dear Liz announced that she knew a “fun game.” She dashed to her bedroom and returned with a pair of mimeographed sheets.
“It’s Proust’s questionnaire. Do you know it, Sig?”
“No. What is it? A test for latent heterosexuality?”
Ha ha’s all around, and a giggle from the hairdresser.
“It might do that. It reveals character. We used to play it at college.” She flung her best smile into his ego’s gaping maw. “Would you like to play?”
“Why not? There are no reporters present.”
The sycophant chorus howled, “Yes!”
“Okay. Number one: ‘What for you is the depth of misery?’”
“Not being recognized by a headwaiter.”
“‘Where would you like to live?”’
“In Ringsend, with a red-headed whore.”
“Where is zat?” asked the French girl.
“Joyce,” said Liz.
“No. His pal Gogarty.” Sig brogued to declaim:
“I will live in Ringsend
With a red-headed whore,
And the fan-light gone in
Where it lights the hall-door;
And listen each night
For her querulous shout,
As at last she streels in
And the pubs empty out.”
“Bravo!” cried Mr. Pismire.
“I ration myself to one use of the verb ‘streel’ in each novel.”
“Number three,” said Liz: “‘For which fault have you the greatest indulgence?’”
“Unchastity.” He looked steadily at her. “If that’s still considered a fault.”
Liz looked quickly back to her paper. “‘Who is your favorite fictional character?’”
“Carlo Snyde, news photographer and master of sang-froid. I last left him in the Sinai, excising the chastity of an Israeli girl corporal during an Egyptian counterattack. I may call the book Blood and Sand.”
Here, as after most of Sig’s answers, there was copious congratulatory laughter.
“‘Your favorite historical personage?’”
“Rasputin.”
“‘Which women are your heroines in real life?”’
“Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. Are you old enough to remember them?”
“Who they are?” asked the hairdresser.
“Un par de putas británicas,” answered I.
“Oh, no!” moaned Sig. “Much more than just whores. They put the English-speaking world back into the grand tradition of Fotzepolitik.”
“The Profumo case, right?” Liz was sitting up like a spaniel.
“Right. Caught in fragrante!” Sig guffawed his puny pun; Liz yelped ecstatically.
“Number seven: ‘Which women do you prefer in works of fiction?’
“Isolde, Medea, Circe; witches and bitches all.”
“Do you believe in witchcraft?” I asked.
“Is that on the questionnaire?”
“No,” said Liz.
“I’ll answer anyway: I’ve met a few women who could cast a spell and was married to one who could raise the devil.”
“I’d like to hear her side of the story,” said Liz.
“She threatens to tell it to Ms. whenever I delay with a maintenance check.”
“Do you have any children?”
“I will answer only what Proust put down.”
“All right. ‘What quality do you prefer in a man, in a woman?’
“Energy in a man, affection in a woman, absence in a fairy, and conversion in a dyke.”
“‘What is your favorite virtue?’”
“Impatience. Impatience is a good south wind that winnoweth the bullshit out of life.”
“‘Your favorite occupation?’”
“Careless love.”
“‘Who would you have liked to be?”’
“Errol Flynn. I had the privilege to know him slightly on Mallorca nineteen years ago, when he was already over the hill and I about to start climbing. He was a man entirely without frontal lobes and hence inordinately happy.”
“‘What is the principal trait of your character?’”
“Impatience.”
“‘What do you most appreciate in your friends?’”
“Patience.”
“‘What is your principal defect?’”
“The compulsion to put words on paper, which robs me of much time for careless love.”
“‘What is the dream which you would most like to realize?”’
“Continued popular acclaim, followed closely by immortality.”
“You believe in immortality, then?” I asked. The man, after all, might not be completely worthless.
“In the sense of being remembered, in Stendhal’s sense of being read in a hundred years. I don’t want to sound more presumptuous than necessary. We were speaking of dreams.”
“You don’t believe in another life, then?”
“No. Do you?”
“With me, Mr. Heilanstalt, it’s not a matter of belief. It’s a matter of concrete—”
“Camilo! We’re playing a game.”
“Play on, Liz. Play on, then, by all means.”
“I just don’t think we should go off on that tangent.”
“I perfectly agree. Play on.”
“All right. Where was I?” She ruffled the sheets nervously. “All right. Here. ‘What for you would be the greatest unhappiness?’”
“To be out of print.”
“‘If you weren’t a person, what would you like to be?’”
“Ridiculous question! Did Proust write that? A bidet, then. Or a girl’s bicycle seat.”
“Qué crudo!” squealed the hairdresser.
“At least I didn’t say a boy’s seat.”
“‘What is your favorite color?’”
“Have none.”
“Do you want to stop playing?”
He smiled and shook his head. “No, dear. I love to play.”
“‘What is your favorite flower?”’
“Rose of Washington Square.”
“‘Bird?’”
“The cuckoo.” He managed not to look my way.
“Which are your favorite prose authors?’”
“Scheherazade and Rabelais.”
“‘Poets?’”
“Homer and Homer. There are two, you know.”
“‘Who are your present-day real-life heroes?’”
“General Genghis Manduco. When in Rome …” (Sig changed his mind soon afterward. See note l.)
“‘Who are your heroines in history?’”
“Joan of Arc and Dido. Each a terrific piece of ash.” The last phrase was partially crushed in Siggy’s giggle.
“‘What names do you prefer?”’
“Siegfried and Sieglinde.”
“‘What do you most detest?”’
“An unresponsive woman.” He glowed Lizward; Liz glowed back. Nothing to detest there.
“‘What military deed do you most admire?’”
“The Battle of the Little Bighorn.”
“‘Which natural gift would you most like to possess?”’
“Personal magnetism.”
“‘What is the present state of your personality and spirit?’”
“Magnetic.”
“‘How would you like to die?”’
“Ha ha! In the saddle, like John Garfield.”
“How is zat?”
“En baisant, ma chére. En baisant.”
“‘If you had to choose a personal motto, what would it be?”’
“Every man for himself.”
“That’s all.”
“And my character, or lack of it, has been revealed.”
“I guess so.”
He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. “Well, dear. If you’ve any other games to play, just let me know.”
10. So-called revolution
Alejandro Sancudo (born 1900, President of Tinieblas 1930, 1940-1942, 1948-1952, 1970) took office as constitutional President of the Republic on 1st June, 1970, after a campaign in which his supporters assured the nation that the lunacy that had led to his being deposed three times was now entirely mellowed from his mind. His first official act was to install his barber as Commander of the Presidential Guard, an appointment based more on loyalty—the fellow held a razor to Sancudo’s throat each morning, after all—than on ability or experience. He then began to purge the civil service down to the last charwoman and, more importantly, to geld the Civil Guard. Plans were made, and cackled over with excessive glee by cronies of the President’s, to dispatch key officers to unsalaried attachéships in obscure and distant lands. A commission was formed to draft blueprints for converting the Officers’ Club into a music-drama conservatory—not a bad idea so far as national priorities went but one unpopular with the Guard. Then, on 8th June, 1970, General Narses Puñete, who had been promised reappointment as Guard Commandant, was summoned to the Presidential Palace and presented with a retirement order and a ticket to Miami. Puñete accepted both, but that evening, while President Sancudo was at the movies (the film was Pasolini’s Oedipus), troops led by a group of junior officers occupied the ministries, the radio and television stations, the offices of the Compañía Interplanetaria de Telecommunications, and, of course, the Palace (which Sancudo’s barber surrendered without a fight), imprisoned a great number of Sancudo’s supporters (including his daughter-in-law, the film star Elena Delfi), and threw the President out of office for the fourth time in his long and lively career.
