The Dissertation, page 47
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
The director is a pro as well. The real Liz left home this afternoon wearing a Grecian robe-style dress gathered at her waist with a silk cord; the director had his phantom so attired. The real Liz wears no bra, and he brought phantom Liz to today’s tryst braless. More, he had her slip her panties off before she pressed the bell and (at phantom Sig’s call of “Coming, coming in my pants”) undo the cord and draw her dress wide open, so that when phantom Sig let her in she was shown virtually naked, smiling impishly and bumping her tawny bush at the camera. That is just the sort of vulgar gesture which the real Liz delighted in practicing on me during our early days and which it took more than a year to break her of.
Perron must do the scripts, however, for they are the weak link. As I have said, the show is banal, but then an affair between Liz and Sig would be banal as well. The show might tempt me sorely to invest emotionally in the existence of such an affair, but that, at crucial moments, Perron allows his tasteless thirst for the sensational to split his phantom from its model. After today’s commercial, for example, there was a fade-in to phantom Sig sprawled sleeping with his dong at half-staff in a vortex of churned sheets. Phantom Liz entered from the bath, surveilled him lovingly, then dropped her head to graze. Phantom Sig groaned, fluttered his eyelids, closed them, smiled excrementivorously, and drew a pillow over his face. Phantom Liz knelt slowly to the floor, gripping the bed with her right hand, resting her left high on his inner thigh. Her long hair fell across her face onto his abdomen; her cheeks plumped and concaved in slow rhythm, like the bellows of an oxygen mask. After about two minutes of this, the camera slid away artfully along phantom Sig’s quivering legs. A weak thrashing of his feet against the bedclothes; a curling of toes; the sound track moaned for Jesus. At length there was a shot of him pushing back the pillow, smiling. “You make a bell of an alarm clock.”
Close-up of phantom Liz, head raised now. Brushes her hair aside. Swallows. “I love going down. I just love it.”
Brilliant! Masterful! Finely calibrated to drive me mad with pain! Except that the real Liz, my Liz, loves nothing of the sort. She can, at rare intervals, be prevailed upon, but it is never worth the bribe or the diplomacy, for since she does not love it—does not, in fact, enjoy it in the slightest—she does not do it well. The whole scene was, thus, out of character, the statement false, the swallow ludicrous. In straining for sensation for its own sake, Perron rendered today’s program and the entire series unconvincing.
Luckily for my peace of mind, Perron is a bungler. I shall not waste another minute on his disgusting fabrications.
57 Who has not known?
I have known from the first. I have been called insane, but never stupid. In my own home, on the first night they met, within instants after headache drove me to my bedroom, they were at it like a pair of goats or monkeys. In the center of our living room, no doubt. With all the others cheering their encouragement, I well imagine. Dog style, most probably: Liz with her rump raised; Sig slavering onto her nape. I smelled fucking on her when she came in later. I have known all along. Insane perhaps, stupid never.
There was no point in saying anything. When one is married to a demented nymphomaniac, when one has given one’s good name to a she-otter, when one has pledged oneself in God’s sight to a scumbag, one keeps one’s mouth shut. The trull believed she’d fooled me. Having no sniff of honor anywhere about her, she cannot perceive it in another. She is, in any case, entirely too self-centered ever to thank me for bearing her cuntishness in silence, but you, my examiners, will appreciate my native urge to spare even so slimed a reputation as hers and will, thus, excuse certain equivocations in these notes. I have, I say again, known all along.
My actions this evening were, then, simply a diversion, a momentary lapse in my heroic decency, a very mildly malicious experiment in discomfiting a pair who have done me frightful and repeated injury. They were not an effort to discover if the Perron Show was shot live and, hence, if my wife was faithless.
How could they be? I have known for months. In fact, on our wedding night, more than four years ago, I had a detailed presentiment of this whole tawdry episode, for besides being an accomplished medium and a telepathist of genius, I have the gift of precognition. I was forewarned and thus forearmed. How else was I able to endure betrayal with such exemplary stoicism? Yes, I have known for years!
I caught the show again this evening (afternoon—whatever time it was). I confess no weakness of will, no crumbling of resolution. Like other mortals, I have to urinate now and again. I avoided my own bathroom and went to Liz’s. The show was on in there too. I could scarcely help watching while I pissed.
Sig, who is rather a lazy lover, lay hack with his head and shoulders braced on pillows. Liz perched above him like a jockey. She posted down slowly, and came to rest.
“Don’t move. Just let me milk you.”
“Christ! Where did you learn that?”
“In college.” Her lips drew tight, then relaxed. “My daddy told me to learn all I could.” Squeeeeeze. “My seminar prof taught me.” Squeeze. “It’s in Burton’s notes to The Arabian Nights. Stop moving!”
He shut his eyes and flung his left hand out limply, brushing his fingers against the dial of the phone on his night table. Possessed at once by a mild maliciousness, I zipped, adjusted the mirror-backed bathroom door, and hurried to the phone beside Liz’s bed. Seconds later, Sig’s phone began ringing on the sound track.
The cheese I’d eaten earlier must have been rancid, for I was seized with intense nausea. I slammed the receiver down and dashed, retching, to the bowl. I felt a little better after a moment, but I could scarcely help watching as I rinsed my mouth.
“God! I’m going crazy!” Sig writhed his hips. “Oh, Siggy. Just be cool.”
I set the door, went back, and dialed again. “Don’t answer.”
“Of course I’ll answer. Telephone conversation is a great aid to coolness.”
Sig’s image, reflected in the door mirror’ picked up the phone. His “Hello” rang on the sound track and in the receiver at my ear.
“Hello, Sig. How about some tennis? The lights are on tonight at the hotel.”
“Sorry, Camilo.” He drew a finger across his lips for Liz. She squeezed, then gave him a Giaconda smile. “I have to be in class in half an hour.”
“Too bad. Well, let me speak to Liz.”
“Liz isn’t here, Camilo.” They grinned at each other. “She’s probably over at the university.”
“Stop lying, pig face! You’ve got your cock stuck in her halfway to her eyeteeth! Don’t tell me she isn’t there!”
He went white and (if the look on Liz’s face is a fair witness) limp as well.
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know what it’s known as in the whorehouse where your mother worked, but I believe Masters and Johnson call it the ‘female-superior’ position.”
He tipped Liz off him and stuffed the phone under his pillow. “He’s watching us from somewhere!” Horrified stare toward the window, which was heavily curtained, then around the room. “He must have a camera hidden in here somewhere!”
“Oh, my God!”
I experienced unquestionable pleasure in seeing the revolting pair wrenched from lust to terror, but I soon realized that Señor Perron’s product is grossly overrated. Resentment is for people with no talent. Revenge is for those with nothing else to do. I was just as glad when Liz groped up the phone receiver and I could get the matter finished.
“Camilo?” By this time she was weeping.
“Don’t speak. Don’t expect results from crocodile tears. Above all, don’t come here. There will be blood if, you do. I’ll have Arnulfa pack your things and set them in the hall. Pick them up tomorrow while I’m sleeping. Noon will be good. Make as little noise as possible. Don’t come inside. You may keep the car.”
I put the phone down softly. I watched Liz kneeling naked on Sig’s bed with the phone clutched to her face. Then the picture faded. I do not think the program will be aired tomorrow.
58. My aunt Rosario
My aunt Rosario Fuertes was the chief source for Chapter II. Also of help were Dr. Alonso Gusano Bosquez, Natalia de Triana, Dora Corpiño (formerly the check girl at the Jacaranda), and José Puñal and Pablo Patada (formerly members of the Tinieblan Civil Guard), al] of whom I contacted by spirit interview, and Señor Gustavo Oruga, whom I spoke with by telephone—a baby-blue Princess model telephone, to be exact, which some time later sailed through the air, cord tearing from its umbilicus, and crashed into the door mirror, smashing same to shards.
Rosario visited me without my calling. Her name—not her maiden name, you may be sure—came up during my interview with Dr. Gusano, and an instant later, just as I realized how much I craved to speak with this marvelous woman who’d been my father’s lover, she appeared. Her reunion with Dr. Gusano was most touching: when she greeted him as her dear friend, he knelt weeping, as before a queen or saint.
Later that night and in many successive interviews, Rosario spoke with complete candor of her childhood, her travels with Perron’s company, and her idyll with León. I had, of course, heard stories about a beautiful cabaret entertainer with whom my father had a tragic amour before he left Tinieblas, but I was entirely ignorant of Rosario’s existence as a member of my family. It seems that neither my father nor my grandmother Rebeca ever mentioned her after that night of frightful revelations. Certainly neither ever mentioned her to me while they were in this world, and during all my conversations with Rebeca’s spirit she offered nothing about her daughter. After I had spoken with the Spanish surgeon who delivered León and Rosario, I asked my grandmother about León’s twin sister. Rebeca answered, “Lost,” and said no more.
Rosario told me all with such disarming frankness that I felt not the least revulsion at her and León’s breaking of humanity’s most terrible taboo. Sadness surely, but not revulsion. I have tried to compose my text so that the reader will feel none either.
I was ecstatic to discover yet another magnificent female among my close relations and overjoyed to have her help. Without it I should surely have been unable to discover two vital aspects of my father’s history: the entrance of love into his life and the secret of his exile from Tinieblas. Like everything else of value in this world, however, it had to be paid for. My aunt was as free with opinions as with recollections. She deplored my attitude toward women. She persisted in averring that I used my wife ill. She did not stick at likening me to her own husband, with whom (she said) I share certain unpleasant characteristics. She called me self-centered, for instance, and in example cited my conduct with Padre Celso Labrador, whom, as far as I am concerned, I have treated with a patience and consideration that borders on the saintly. Like all the Fuertes women, Rosario can at times show a barbed tongue, but I took no real hurt or anger because, despite some misguided views, she clearly had my welfare to heart. When, for example, she accused me of being unwilling to love and I, rather than oppose her, replied that my business in this world isn’t loving but bringing meaning, she smiled, much like my mother, with sweet sadness, and said she loved me all the same and always would.
I must say she was marvelous tonight. She was at my side, all consolation, before the last mirror splinters had bit the tiles, and only for a moment was she anything but understanding. That was some time later, about nine o’clock, I should suppose, when she had got me to lie down in my room and had sat down beside me.
“You must forgive her,” she said, speaking of my wife. I shook my head.
“What did you expect?”
“Loyalty.”
“Amazing. Why on earth, Camilo, should you have expected her to be loyal?”
“I married her.”
“And she married you. All right, I won’t press that now, but she wasn’t so terribly disloyal, you know. Taking pleasure with someone else is the least of all possible disloyalties. She believes in you.”
“And therefore had me imprisoned and tortured!”
“All right, dear. All right. I understand. No more for tonight, I promise.”
Then my lovely aunt Rosario—surely the loveliest woman in either this world or the next—proposed a wondrous thing in my behalf. Upon her “death,” racked with guilt at her unknowing sin of incest, Rosario had applied for Good Works and had been accepted. Some years later she had enrolled in a subdivision of that activity called Guardian Spirits, for it was her desire to watch over her brother León and guide him if she could. In the interval she had followed his life in this world, and once she entered Guardian Spirits she was never far from his side. She could, therefore, report on the trajectory of his life, tell me the great part of his thoughts and feelings, and, of course, point me toward other sources who might fill in lacunae in her knowledge and balance her admittedly subjective views. In short, learned examiners, my aunt Rosario proposed to help me with this dissertation.
“Not because I feel sorry for you,” she added. “Or in compensation for supposed ‘wrongs’ done to you by a member of my sex. Your father was a man, Camilo, and studying his life may help you to become one also.”
“That’s not really my ambition. I want to be a scholar.”
“Well, to be anything, you have to be a human being first, man or woman as the case may be.”
She did not promise to make my research easy. She cannot do that anyway. It is enough that she may make it possible. There will be new trials. I accept them.
Rosario left me around midnight at my urging. I wanted to tie up the loose ends of Part Two of this dissertation, concerning my father’s early life, before pressing my investigations further, and my aunt agreed, saying that work was probably the best thing for me, if not the only thing, at least for a time. She will return tomorrow.
Accordingly, I sat down among the decomposing remains of my private life, blew their fetid stench from my mind’s nose, and finished Chapter 11. Then I composed these last two notes. It is now false dawn on something-or-other June, 1974. The apartment is quiet; it will remain so. The composition of note 57 brought back certain unpleasant images and smells; Seconal will quash them. I look forward to an uninterrupted life of the mind, entirely free of the great inconvenience of this world: other human beings.
PART THREE
59. He ceased to bathe, to shave or groom himself
I have followed suit.
No, my conclusion-jumping examiners, not from neglect inspired by a personal despair. I have never been happier. I admit that when I awoke from the pill-produced sleep looked forward to in note 58 above, I was in no wise concerned with vanity or hygiene, that I did not bother to change the clothing I’d collapsed in or so much as touch my toothbrush, but got on to my aunt Rosario Fuertes and begged her to come at once, so that I might cleanse my brain of certain foul thoughts and images in the clear stream of historical research; but after hearing her description of my father’s state and her gratuitous comment that I too appeared somewhat unkempt, I resolved to imitate his action purposefully, as a Stanislavskian aid to understanding and relating his condition. Fellow scholars will, I am sure, find a report on this experiment of interest.
I no longer pay attention to what day it is, but five days or so have, I believe, gone by. This afternoon when I sat down to begin composing Chapter 12, I found my fingernails a little long for typing and, therefore, clipped them, but I have made no other concessions. I perform no physical exertion, but the temperature in Tinieblas varies this time of year between seventy-six and eighty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, with the humidity above ninety percent, and while my personal odor is no longer discernible to me, a wrinkling of Arnulfa’s nose this morning suggests that it grows ripe. My beard is thick, or feels thick at any rate (I no longer consult mirrors). Although I note no important sores or ulcers, a ubiquitous and constant itch envelops all my person, and certain sectors have been scratched quite raw. These are the chief physical consequences. Mentally, I have developed an intense sympathy for the subject of this dissertation, my father, León Fuertes. Not only have I clearly imagines my father’s essays in self-degradation; I have relived them, both while interviewing sources and in dreams. The reader is better placed than I to judge the quality of Chapter 12, but I anticipate success with it, an anticipation that seems to me borne out already in my work tonight. I have produced a quantity of pages. Quality control appears good. If I can manage to maintain this standard to the completion of the chapter, I may then permit myself a rinse and change of clothes.
My aunt Rosario Fuertes was not so much the source for Chapter 12 as a source of sources, the more important of whom will be duly credited in future notes, but I must continue to acknowledge her assistance, which is both material and moral. I should have had a frightful time scrounging up data without her, and she has been an unchecked fount of comfort and encouragement, particularly at those times—and there were many—when I suffered my father’s debased state acutely. She has not (and I thank her for it) made any reference to my personal life.
My personal life has, in fact, withered away most reassuringly now that other humans no longer infest my environs. I burned without opening the letter that my wife left when she collected her effects. I dismantled the doorbell; the telephone remains ripped from its cord. I have authorized Arnulfa to sleep home in La Cuenca, have given her a check for five hundred inchados, which ought to last for months, and have told her she need come only in the mornings to bring me food and make a thermos of coffee. She is the only living person whom I see, and that (I calculate) for no more than a few minutes per month. I suffer no interruptions, nor any obligation to maintain an artificial schedule. I work until exhausted, then collapse and dream about my father. Since the dreams are, I believe, as valuable as formal interviews of spirits, I waste no time at all. I have become a machine for researching and recording history, The facilities of Learning may be more elaborate but I doubt that they are more congenial than the ones I now enjoy, and my one complaint about my current situation is that it prevents my letting a certain whore know how agreeable it is.
