The Dissertation, page 42
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
Sig read us his brainchild with great pride and glee, receiving immediate appreciation from Liz. I didn’t get the joke, I must confess, until he quoted me the first eleven lines of Coleridge’s masterpiece. I am still not competent to judge his execution, but his conception seems most apt, and I include the jingle in my text with his permission for the following good reasons:
1. In connecting and contrasting Kubla and McKinley, an artful pleasure dome and a gross military complex, Sig comments meaningfully on the nature of US imperial civilization;
2. Tinieblas compares well with Xanadu as an exotic if not mythical domain;
3. Parody and bathos are among the very few sane responses to U.S.-Tinieblan relations and to this world in general.
This note will, I trust, acquit me of any charge of malice against Mr. Heilanstalt and demonstrate the serenity with which I am able to give the devil is due.
29. She cooked …
But not Liz Cleaver Fuertes. Liz toiled not, neither did she spin. She slept until midmorning, then. lay abed past noon. She made vigorous love each afternoon and tender love each evening. Between, she read, or sunned herself, or strolled along the beach. On Sundays she did the Times (N.Y., not L.A.) crossword, consulting Roget’s Thesaurus and the microprinted O.E.D., drafting with a number 4 pencil, fair-copying with a felt-tipped pen, calling in to her husband’s study for help with Spanish, French, and Latin words. On odd occasions she might open up a can and heat its contents. Mostly she nibbled cold cuts from the Frigidaire or, late at night, munched on the honeyed toast her husband brought her. When she undressed, she tossed her clothes into a bedroom chair. When the pile attained a certain volume, she wrapped it in a bed sheet for her husband to take to the laundromat. She lived thus some three months (June-August, 1971), sugared in ease and pampered like a princess, until the afternoon when, on the occasion of her husband’s experiencing some difficulty in achieving erection—the perfectly normal and predictable result of stewing ninety days in hothouse lust—she remarked that since he couldn’t get it up, he might as well take out the laundry. He threw her out of bed and the laundry out the window, and things were never quite the same again.
30. Conjugal rights
The word “conjugal,” as even you, Professors Crimes and Lilywhite, must know derives from the Latin íugum, a yoke, the symbol of submission for defeated enemies, the substance of bondage for beasts of the field. It is cognate with both “yogi” and “yokel” and carries complementary connotations of patience and stupidity. The term “conjugal rights” denotes one of the more disgusting human conventions: authority to molest another person sexually. As for claiming such rights, civilized voices have been loud to cry out against the husband, be he enraged, inebriated, or simply gorged with letch, who takes the rites of marriage for the right to rape, but how much more cruel is this situation when reversed! Moral violence can be worse than physical. Brute force acquires a certain dignity when compared with pitiless nagging, with insult, with threats of scandalous adultery. Husbands deserve respect as much as wives, especially if they are engaged in intense and valuable mental activity, especially if, given a spate of rest and congenial surroundings, they are willing and able to provide not a mere bestial prodding but an act of love (see note 25). But increase of appetite grows by what it feeds on, and the bitch is up to her old complaints again.
31. Hung by the door
My priest (see note 24) takes this stance now. I have never known a spirit at once so persistent and so polite. He has not missed a visit for fifteen days, and yet (with one exception) he has been a perfect gentleman. My experience of spirits has been that they like to play by their own rules, as if existence in the other world gave them the right to patronize or bully those of us here who can perceive them, but while this fellow clearly wants to get something off his chest and has picked me out for his confessor, he has the decency to be as unobtrusive as he can. His good manners have, in fact, so impressed me that the other night, at the risk of overly encouraging him, I offered to take his name and call him when I’d time. He merely shook his head and let me go back to my work. In this regard his single outburst, if one can call it that, is strange indeed. Last Friday, as I was copying Sig’s verses for my text (see note 28 above), he gave out a most piteous groan and, when I looked around, asked how could I, an educated man, pay attention to such abomination? Perhaps he was offended by the phrase “short-arm inspections,” though he doesn’t seem one of your priggish clerics. He may be an amateur of romantic poetry, or even a distant relative of S. T. Coleridge’s. But while I have, lately, been willing to let him watch me for as long as he cares to, I cannot tolerate interruption. I shoo’d him off directly. He returned the next midnight, and the next, with the wounds on his hands freshly opened like summer roses and blood (as from a crown of thorns) dripping profusely down his forehead. He was there tonight, beside the door, when I began the last passage of Chapter 6, and were I to turn my head right now I might well see his martyred eyes still smiling sweetly at me. It is all I can do—perhaps because he reminds me of my mother—to steel myself against him, to keep from giving up a night or more to hear his story.
32. León Fuertes
“Señor Fuertes will give no interviews till further notice.” So says a twit from the PR Department of Performing Arts, as if I were a scandalmongering hack and not a scholar, not León Fuertes’ son. Nor can I be certain that the blame rests with Performing Arts; my father may be purposely avoiding me.
Having by the end of Chapter 6 reached a point in this history where the data I compiled last year gets very thin and where my father could give vital information, I began serious efforts to contact his spirit. I used the procedure traced in note 4 and have besides canceled my tennis dates with Sig and contrived to isolate myself from all distractions. Results have been at once encouraging and bleak: I have been able to tune in clearly to the Astral Plane; I’ve raised a host of spirits who know my father there or knew him here; I have caused to materialize in this room, speedily and at no great cost in mental energy, some very obscure spirits who had information germane to this dissertation; but I have not bad a whisper from León Fuertes himself. Spirits who know or know of my father in the next world have told me, variously, that he plans to transfer from Performing Arts to Sport; that he has gone AWOL from Performing Arts to Idyll in the company of his sometime leading lady Geraldine Farrar; that he is in Victim, (a) because Lev Bronstein (L. Trotsky), who stages spectacles, not uprisings, these days and who’ll direct three operas later on this year, wants him to use the Method approach for his role as Mario in Tosca, or (b) as a result of a bad wager made during a weekend spent in Risk. My mother says he must be resting after the long season and that the PR people are terrible about forwarding messages, even those from close relatives, but this last is no excuse or comfort. I need no Astral functionaries to pass my messages. I beam them loud and clear, and unless my father is, in fact, in Victim, he’s heard me calling. Can it be that he disapproves of me? No statesman can afford to disprize the work of a serious historian, but does he, like Dr. Vertilanz, consider me an unbalanced dilettante? Can he be so myopic? Was Dr. Vertilanz correct? Or is it that my father so enjoys his new career that he cares no more for this world, for his children, for his country, for his place in history? The melding of his soul to noble music, communion with the masters, “Bravo!”s ringing to the gilded ceilings of great halls, the thrills of Risk (“That’s Fuertes, the tenor, over there. God, what a plunger!”), time dripping sweetly through the boughs of Idyll with a proud and lovely diva by his side—what can he care for us?
For reasons that the text makes clear, Rebeca Fuertes could throw little light on the events describes in Chapter 7. León’s stepfather, Florencio Merluza, whom I interviewed on 12th and 13th August, was of some help, though not so much as I had hoped before I learned that upon “dying,” he chose Drink. Of the many spirits who broke in while I was calling León Fuertes, three had data pertinent to what I’ve called my father’s urchinhood. These I recalled and interviewed on I 6th August. I have also used information from one living source, José R. Fuertes, my uncle Pepe (see note 35 below). A vein on the right side of my nose is throbbing fiercely.
33. She’d horn him
A favorite threat of my own wife’s when she feels bored or restless. Today, for example, I was asleep—I now go to bed around seven A.M., get up for lunch, then take a short siesta—when Liz came in, lay down beside me, fumbled about until she noticed my erection, and, having nothing else to do, woke me to claim it. Now, it is scientific fact (see Gay Gaer Luce and Julius Segal, Sleep [New York, 1966], p. 203) that sleeping men experience periodic erections, which have nothing to do with sexual excitement. I tried to explain this to Liz, but she persisted in her advances. The sine qua non of controlled astral communication is sexual continence (see note 4), and as I had no intention of missing a week’s calls—my father might respond later tonight, for all I know—I had to be quite firm in my refusal. She cried a bit, then, in a flash, went over to defiance, screamed she’d be damned before she’d beg for love, said she would get it in the street if not at home. The main thing is I managed to keep calm, but none of this makes my work any easier.
34. Mystery
The mysterious disappearance of Father Celso Labrador, a Costaguanan priest assigned to a rural parish near Belém, has become the chief topic of concern in the country. Labrador, who may have been the priest Sig almost flattened on our way to Mituco (see note 25), was last seen on the evening of Thursday, 7th March, when someone as yet unidentified called him from the board hut he shared with a peasant family. Two days later, on my return from Mituco, our maid (cook, family retainer—she brought my mother up), Arnulfa, who goes to mass each morning, told me that “a priest has vanished,” but I paid no mind to it. On 20th March the government gave out—all newspapers are under state control—that Labrador had fled to Costaguana with the cash fund of a cooperative farm he organized, but the Tinieblan Church denied this charge from every pulpit in the country, citing a letter from the Costaguanan Ambassador that Labrador’s passport is at the embassy, having been in the process of being renewed when he disappeared, and another from the General Manager of the Pelf Fiduciary Trust branch in La Merced that no large withdrawals have been made from the co-op’s account. The Church demanded an inquiry; the government saw no cause to hold one. The Church resolved to hold an inquiry of its own and hired a Ticamalan detective; the government declared this an insult to the nation, denied the Ticamalan entry, and announced the opening of an official probe. This now proceeds with great deliberation while gales of rumor sweep the country from end to end. Some supporters of the government hold that Labrador died of a heart attack while copulating with his host’s daughter and was discreetly buried by the Church. Others say he was abducted by the CIA just to embarrass Genghis. Most people believe that he was murdered either by landlords, on whose holdings he had encouraged peasants to squat, or by the Civil Guard. Publicly the lists are drawn with the radio, television, and newspapers denouncing Father Labrador and the “foreigner-controlled” Church, while the Church keeps asking “Where is Padre Celso?” and offering masses for his soul, and asking anyone with knowledge of the matter to come forward and confess on pain of excommunication. You, my learned examiners, are no doubt thinking that the solution of this mystery may lie within my grasp, and you no doubt are right. I’d bet my seventy-two hours of graduate course credit that the principal figure of the controversy is right this moment staring meekly at my back from his habitual corner near the door. But if you think that I will let matters of momentary import, mere “current events,” distract me from the work of making history, you are wrong. Wrong, Dr. Grimes. Wrong, Professor Lilywhite. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
35. José
José Rosendo Fuertes (born 1921, President of Tinieblas 1966-1970), my uncle Pepe. My father and uncle are an excellent example of how two brothers may develop different personalities. León was direct and prodigal; Pepe is devious and mean. León led by example; Pepe never commits himself until he has a firm grip on the other fellow’s privates. And so on. One of the first dentists graduated from our National University, Pepe, who is ambidextrous and who, in compensation for his crippled leg, built up his arms and shoulders by working out with spring devices, was able to pluck molars agilely with either hand, but, by his own gleeful admission, his success came from his uncanny ability to divine within an inchado or two how much a patient could afford to pay. When treating my brother Carlos and myself, he eschewed the use of Novocaine on the grounds that pain builds character and that children will brush their teeth more conscientiously when they fear the dentist’s drill. I am convinced that thrift was his sole motive. He abandoned dentistry in 1962, when he persuaded my father to appoint him Minister of Public Health. He continued in the cabinet after my father’s assassination, had a lean year when my father’s successor, Bonifacio Aguado, was deposed by the Guardia Civil, but snatched the brass ring in 1966, conning the leaders of the Progressive Party into nominating him for President and winning the election after the front runner, César Sancudo, was gunned down and disabled. He must—since no amount of dental fees could pay his present splendor—have made a fortune in four years as President of the Republic. In March, 1970, he was impeached but not convicted. In April he was soundly thrashed at the polls by Alejandro Sancudo. He left Tinieblas for Miami on Intercontinental flight 487 at 11:59 P.M. on 31st May, 1970, his last day in office, and now resides in Coral Gables.
36. Diverse sources
Slides 1 and 2 are by Italo Bambolini (1888-1956), bartender at the Happy Time from 1925 to 1950. Bambolini was born in the Abruzzi, served briefly as an infantryman in World War I, worked as a waiter at the Royal Danieli, and emigrated to Tinieblas after Mussolini’s rise to power. He was among the most vociferous of the spirits who broke in while I was calling León Fuertes. He claimed possession of most vital information, and the glimpse he gives us of young León has a certain value, but has main wish was just to pass some time. He has applied for Earthly Delights, which has a frightfully long waiting list, and like most waiting spirits will do anything for a few moments of diversion.
(Spirits not yet accepted in activities may visit this world, and Performing Arts entertains them with concerts, plays, etc. They are, however, in the main quite bored and restless, and their condition has given rise to terrestrial superstitions—e.g., the Greek view that one cannot enter Hades unless and until his body receives proper burial. Virgil takes this up [in Aeneid, VI: 305-330] and comes fairly close to the truth when he says that the unburied must wait a hundred years before they cross the Acheron. A spirit rarely has to wait more than a century. Dogmatic Dante, convinced that what happens to you in the next world depends on what you’ve done in this one and committed to a system of final solutions, gives us [in Inferno, III: 22-69] a great throng of souls who were in this life but lukewarm, who did neither good nor evil, who since they never really lived “have no hope of death,” and who must roam the hither bank of Acheron, goaded by wasps and filthed with pus and vermin, throughout eternity. This wonderfully imagined scene perhaps informs a valid view of this world but tells us little more than nothing of the next. As usual, Dante allowed his lust for order to distort his insight.)
Slide 3 is by my uncle Pepe, who remembered León’s dive from Lola’s mainmast for Liz and me in June of 1972 when we visited him and my aunt Clara briefly in Coral Cables. Florencio Merluza did slide 4.
The author of slide 5, Sarita Paz, “died” of amoebic dysentery in 1940 and now is in Good Works, an activity whose complement includes a high percentage of former prostitutes. Along with other things, spirits attached to Good Works try to project charitable impulses to people in this world. Like many others moved by good intentions, they can be annoying. Señorita Paz, for example, squandered an hour of my time and a great volume of my patience in meek and yet persistent sermonizing on my conduct toward my wife. Where she got her information I don’t know, but it was badly garbled, almost as though dear Liz possessed the gift of astral conversation. I did not stoop, of course, to tell “my side of the story,” and I resisted the nearly irresistible impulse to suggest to Señorita Paz that my private life is none of her sainted business. In charity to her, I assume that if she had the facts and Liz could hear her, she’d aim her good intentions at the proper target. When I could bring her to the point, she told me that she knew my father well, for he visited her place of employment most every evening for six years, sometimes alone and sometimes with Merluza, selling smokes. After giving me the picture shown in text above, she went on to say that León crept out while his prey was orgasming, that she did not see what happened when the bully put his sneaker on but that she heard his scream, and that when she, a colleague, and the madam reached the room, his foot had swollen to the size and consistency of a soccer ball. As you gringos say, witty examiners, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
I was introduced to Maribel Canoa, author and cosubject of slide 6, by my mother. Both are on the waiting list for Love; both loved my father, each in her own way; they have become fast friends. Maribel and León continued to see each other on and off until 1936, when he left Tinieblas. Later she followed his career from afar. She “died” by fire during the United States intervention of November, 1966, applied for Love, went into Prorogation, recognized my mother, who had preceded her by but two months and whose name and picture she had oftentimes seen in the papers, and, unable to restrain her curiosity, approached her. Each had a tinge of jealousy to overcome, but each was hungry for the other-’s view of León Fuertes, the one man in my mother’s life and the most illustrious one in Maribel’s. I am sure that Maribel did not give my mother so candid a glimpse of young León as she gave me. It is said that I resemble my father in his sterner moods—my brother, Carlos, has his smile—while some women have found me attractive in my own right. In any case, I think that Maribel, who is a very loving woman, was drawn to me and might have, were such contacts possible for spirits still in Prorogation, sought to press our intercourse beyond the verbal. In lieu of more substantial titillations, she gave the snapshot of my father’s first and her most innocent amour. If Liz possessed her playful, generous nature, I might find it more difficult to meet the physical requirements I set myself for astral communication.
