The Dissertation, page 5
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
Rebeca’s memory of the next few years is hazed in opium fumes. The functionary’s after-pleasure pipe became the whore’s addiction. Her life was drawn in constant foreground on a scroll of dreams; it flowed like the great slow ocher river, which rose in an unseen distant hinterland and emptied into an unseen distant sea. Men drifted in the current. Rebeca says she fished them easily and pierced their souls with pleasure, that she was from the first not just that house’s prize attraction but the best whore in north China, if not the world. I have no cause to doubt this estimate. She had lived five years in a man’s body, after all, and knew the frets and flutings of that instrument and how to play fine tunes on it. She chose to see herself—and here the opium may have helped—not as a slave or worker but as an artist. She approached what may be called fier public with the artist’s blend of solicitude and scorn, interpenetrating feelings which imply an eagerness to please and a refusal to be influenced. Thus while she touched her lovers deeply and enjoyed their applause, she took no inspiration from them. Her heart and womb were sealed by a strong membrane of contempt. Her lovers were chiefly European—merchants and soldiers, no doubt a diplomat or two, from the concession—and as she was too profitable to be for sale, it oftentimes amused her to suggest one buy her for himself. “Amène-moi en Europe je te ferai heureux.” She would smile softly as he bit his cheek in longing, smile as he slunk away, smile now and melt the hours in her pipe until the next man drifted by. Two years wisped toward her lacquered ceiling, while out beyond her window an empire was stumbling toward nightmare.
I say two years because the clearest explanation for her exit from the brothel is that the Hankow rising (10th November, 1911) convinced the keeper to liquidate his assets. All Rebeca knows is that one day she dreamed of being rocked in a sedan chair through choked and squeaking streets, and next of kneeling over a parchmented old man who giggled as she mouthed his flaccid flesh. The latter dream became recurrent. She had been purchased by a Manchu nobleman, in whose own poppied fantasies there was a role for foreign devil, female.
She lived then in a pleasure garden in the hills above the city, where miniature grottoed mountains recalled the scenes of Chinese paintings. Dwarf cypresses and willows moaned beside a pool of carp born in the time of the Ming emperors and so wise with their age they could relate the antique stories of Stone Monkey and the Flaming Dragon. And there were gilded butterflies with ruby eyes who fluttered their bright wings, and onyx tulips whose jade petals spread and folded with the light, and a shamefaced gelded tiger which the old man led about on a silken leash. It pleased him sometimes to have Rebeca stripped and spraddled and splashed with cream, to watch her writhe as the beast laved her with his rough tongue. And sometimes it was not the tiger but ten or twenty famished Siamese cats, and a servant poured cream on her from a great bowl, and the tongues lapped at her crepitating flesh until her mind capsized in a typhoon of pleasure. There was, besides, a Japanese tattooist who illuminated her in obscure, painful sites, and a succession of coolies, culled from the alleys of the city, bathed and perfumes, primed with spice, and put to mount, according to the old man’s orders and before his avid eyes, upon Rebeca. Then, on a day when he had heard his ancient carp tell stories and mused upon his gilded butterflies and walked his tiger on its silken leash, when he had marveled how the Japanese tattooist’s art took life when Rebeca’s body quivered under feline tongues and observed the energetic stabbings of a coolie boy who’d never till that moment had a woman, the old man felt his potency restored. He had his servants drag the coolie off and mounted in his place. Giggling, he spiked long, poppy-yellow nails into Rebeca’s back. Blood bubbled to his knuckles, and when his eyes rolled upward and his loins burst, Rebeca felt her contempt dissolve into self-hatred. Her womb, which had repelled the seed of near a thousand men, accepted his.
Then he was no more at the villa. One may surmise—since my uncle Nicolas was born on 12th November, 1912—that Rebeca’s owner had learned of the Empress Regent’s abdication (12th February, 1912) and, like most of the Manchus, fled north whence they had come three centuries before. At Tsinan the young servants pulled up the onyx tulips and broke away their jade petals and caught the gilded butterflies and took them off to sell. The old ones and Rebeca stayed. The silver carp were netted up and fried; the cats were skinned for the stew pot. They were dining off the tiger when a company of Kuomintang soldiers found them some months later.
No doubt their captain had stern orders to respect all foreign devils, for Rebeca came to herself in a Christian mission in the city. Racked with pain, for she had no choice but to withdraw from opium. That was well for my uncle Nicolas—it was enough to bear a dynasty of suppurating chromosomes without also being born an addict—, but it almost killed Rebeca. In pain she painted background back into her life. In pain she recomposed her shattered sense of self. And in pain she bore her first son. Pain cleansed her mind and soul.
On the night after my uncle Nicolas was born, Rebeca dreamed she slept in Don Patricio’s mansion on Mituco. Unlike so many dreams, it was not a translation into childhood. She was her full age; Don Patricio was dead. She dreamed that she slept dreamlessly. On waking from her dream, she found it good. She had had art and passion, a medal from Prince Rupprecht and a citation from the Russian staff, a viceroy’s concubine and near a thousand lovers, and a full season in the garden of despair. Now it seemed good to sleep dreamlessly in a familiar house. And so she found a Chinese girl to pose as her child’s mother, and took them both to Shanghai, where she taught language in a private school for girls,15 and earned the money for a wardrobe and their passage to Tinieblas. She planned to find a man to buy that house for her, but all those years had not been molding her for dreamless sleep. In seeking that she found something quite different, her true destiny, which was to bear a hero.
4. The Conception, Gestation, and Birth of León Fuertes
TWO MORNINGS AFTER her tea with Policarpo Madera, Rebeca received magnificent arrangement of chrysanthemums and dahlias, an inlaid rosewood box of native candies, and a letter, which esteemed her in salutation, kissed her feet in envoi, and begged her company in between. The sender was Dr. Azael Burlando16 who possessed the largest private bloc of Mituco Company shares and the most controversial reputation on the island.
Dr. Burlando, who was then in his early forties, was like Rebeca a native of Mituco de Tierra Firme. Like her he was a bastard. Like her he had left home on his tenth birthday. Thirty years later—in other words, about two years before Rebeca’s return—he appeared on the island with a wife whom he kept veiled, engaged the very suite in which Rebeca was now installed, and gave out that he would buy Mituco shares at any reasonable value. His first client was young Balbino Olmos, who was engrossed in dissipating a considerable inheritance. An offer of ten shares at five hundred inchadosl7 the share was accepted without haggling. Dr. Burlando inspected the certificates, unlocked an ironwood coffer that stood beside his bed, removed one of seven casaba-sized bags, and weighed out the price in gold nuggets. By the month’s end he had acquired one hundred shares, the maximum allowed a single owner under the statutes of the company.
As a shareholder, Dr. Burlando was now entitled to reside on the island. He bought—still with gold nuggets—a roomy if inelegant house from the heirs of Don Augusto Roble, repaired it, saw to the furnishings himself, and moved in with his wife and his coffer. The woman, who had never stepped outside the Guest House, never stepped outside her new home. Nor did anyone except Dr. Burlando and the servants ever enter it. He frequented the Café Progreso, standing his round of drinks, playing chess and dominoes, participating in political discussion, and partaking of the unshelled shrimp and crayfish which the manager set out in saucers on the bar each afternoon at six. He attended shareholders’ meetings. He subscribed an aisle seat at the theater and went to every show. But he accepted no invitations nor offered any of his own.
Dr. Burlando seemed rather fat to some men, to other men quite skinny. Acquaintances would sometimes be surprised to find him taller than he’d appeared at their last meeting. Sometimes he looked caucasian, sometimes negroid, sometimes mestizo. Or two friends, observing him from the café bar, looking across their drinks to where he sat immobile at the chessboard, watching now as his hand flashed like a lizard’s tongue to snatch a piece, would disagree as to his size or shape or color. Similarly, there was no getting his past straight. The doctor storied freely and amusingly about his thirty years of absence from Mituco, but the stories varied. He was doctor of medicine from Leipzig, or of philosophy from Coimbra, or of canon law from Rome. He had panned his gold from rivers in the Yukon, amassed it in South Africa purveying guns and bullets to the Boers, traded for it in Makassar and Celebes, along whose coasts he’d piloted a brig, or mined it in the sertão of Brazil. And since each tale was nuggeted with detail, each sounded true while it was being told, yet when they were compared none sounded truer than the others. Mituco was disturbed by the good doctor, angered and fascinated. Men craved his company and resented his tricks. And by the time of his meeting with Rebeca—that is, by June, 1914—the common view was that he was not doctor of anything and that he’d got his gold by selling his soul to the devil.
Like many common views, this was correct in drift but formulated inexactly. All the claimed doctorates were self-conferred, yet there was no question but that Burlando qualified for a doctorate in imposture. Just as he was unwilling to confine himself to one physical aspect, he refused to make do with one personality or profession, and from the age of ten had buffeted about the world inventing Burlandos as the pleasure struck him—this partly from a heightened sensitivity to the possibilities of life and partly from a taste for mocking the rest of mankind, who set such store by unity. And if each of his several lived ended in failure, it was not because he lacked ability or boldness but because he would lose interest in an identity once he had mastered it and would destroy it so that onlookers might see it for the fabrication that it was and realize what fools they’d been for believing in it. Thus Reverendo Padre Azael Burlando, S.J., whose gravity and erudition, casuistry and talent for intrigue commended him to the Bishop of Salamanca and gained him a secretaryship, whose beaked nose, humped back and withered leg seemed excellent (if superfluous) guarantees of his chastity, seduced the bishop’s niece in the cathedral during Good Friday mass, was discovered, and narrowly escaped the fate of Peter Abelard. Thus Azael Burlando, M.D., who had impressed the senior surgeons of Melbourne General Hospital not only with his skill in lopping limbs and excavating entrails but with his dedication to the healing art, began one morning following an amputation to saw away at the patient’s good leg, gleefully quipping to his horrified assistants, the nurses, the gallery of students gaping down in anguish (“Let’s take this one for symmetry; I’ve never done a left leg and can use the practice; for two he gets a discount on the fee …”), until he was dragged, still chattering, out of the operating theater. Thus Burlando El Magnífico, Tamer of Wild Beasts, whose steamer trunks were plastered with bright posters of him romping tigerback and prying at a lion’s jaws, who proved his disdain for death and danger by leaping from the promenade deck of the Titanic into an icy sea to save a lady’s lap dog, who, on the night of terror, as the first boats were weighed away, stood calmly at the high-side rail puffing a cheroot and keeping time with an index finger to the forlorn, brave playing of the ship’s orchestra, emerged two hours later from the fur wrap and silken veils of a demimondaine (she was never found), shameless beneath the gunwale of a lifeboat. Dr. Burlando even failed as an actor—on the face of it the perfect profession for him—simply because he would not stick to a role even for a short run and mocked his public with happy Hamlets and limpwristed Don Juans. As for his gold, the seven casaba-sized sacks of nuggets, the doctor had in fact traded his status in the next world for it. The transaction18 was not a sale, however, but an enlistment, while the enlister was not the devil, who, as commonly conceived, does not exist.
Dr. Burlando did no more to dispel the rumors of fake doctorates and dealings with the devil than he did to stabilize his physical appearance or suppress the contradictions in his autobiographical yarns. Puzzling his neighbors was the great pleasure of his life. When Rebeca reappeared, he resolved to make her his mistress; what better way to mock and shock Mituco? Rebeca la fatal kept by a parvenu! Rebeca, as we know, was fishing for a rich protector, so in effect they were made for each other. But since both were canny bargainers and altogether free of romantic illusions, they did not come so easily to terms.
The courtship of my paternal grandparents, like the mobile phase of Europe’s Totentanz, began with Sarajevo and ended with the Battle of the Marne. On 28th June, 1914, Dr. Azael Burlando paid Rebeca Fuertes a state visit. He paraded his best clothes and offered her his heart. (His hand, alas, was unavailable; he had the misfortune to be married.) Rebeca feigned high outrage, spurned his offer, and riddled his vanity with scorn. There followed diplomatic fencing, mutual mobilization, his declaration that he meant to have her whether she willed or no, and her demand that he restore her the lost paradise of Don Patricio’s mansion. He pressed his advances; she withdrew. The town took sides, some hoping a comeuppance for Rebeca, some longing to see the doctor put in his place, most more or less convinced that he was strong enough to force capitulation. The crisis came on 5th September, when Dr. Burlando bribed a passkey from the Guest House manager and non-interference from the staff and reached Rebeca’s bed. The subsequent engagement, joined after weeks of vigorous maneuver and pressed at closest quarter, exhausted both to stalemate. Forcible rape was the one sexual experience Rebeca had so far not encountered, and Dr. Burlando’s ever-changing aspect made him the most intriguing of all her lovers. Rebeca, for her part, commanded charms such as the doctor had never believed possible. After a night made two weeks long by the heavy curtains of Rebeca’s bedroom, the following equilibrium was reached: Dr. Burlando agreed to buy Don Patricio’s house and keep Rebeca there, but refused to give her any stock or title to the building; Rebeca agreed to receive Dr. Burlando three nights a week, but refused to let him see her naked or to have his child. Then they settled down to bombard each other with demands for what each had refused, neither one able to advance, neither one willing to retreat, both in their hearts as interested in inflicting damage as in securing gains. In other words (lack of anointed vows notwithstanding), they found themselves in the trenches of marriage.19
“If you want a son so badly,” Rebeca might say as they lay in the oleaginous, postcoital stifle of a dry season night; “if you must have a son,” smiling felinely with her voice, since her face was obscured by the darkness in which she habitually received the doctor; “if your vanity demands a reproduction of yourself, please try your wife. There are sufficient bastards in this world already.”
“She’s sterile,” the doctor would reply, puffing his cheroot violently, then holding the dim beacon of its tip over her belly in empty hope of glimpsing her bare flesh. “Sterile,” not adding that her sterility was well-contrived by him, that it was Rebeca’s son he wanted, partly because she was the first furrow he’d deemed worthy of his precious seed, partly because she steadfastly refused to cultivate it.
“If,” the doctor might say of a wet-season morning as they sat beneath the streaming gables of the porch, he in his undershorts and slippers stirring coffee, Rebeca in her lobstered kimono sipping tea; “if you truly crave the right to live here”—nonshareholding Rebeca stayed on Mituco as the doctor’s ward—“and if you can’t buy stock because your fabulous late husband’s fabulous Strasbourg mine and all your fabulous wealth—observe the twin significance that word may bear—is now in German hands, then why not simply marry one of the moist-eyed, wag-tailed tongue-droopers who’re always sniffing after you? I won’t stand in your way. I’ve had you, which is all I ever wanted, especially as you’re not woman enough to breed—though a suspicious man might wonder at the love you show that little Mongol of your maid’s. I can find you a husband at my café by lunchtime. Just say the word.”
“My dear Dr. Burlando,” Rebeca would reply, “you will never comprehend it, I know, but I have too much shame to offer myself to a decent man now that I’ve been soiled by you,” not mentioning that it was shares from Dr. Burlando that she wanted, first because he refused to give her any but also and importantly because she did not care to take another man until she had driven the doctor gaga as she had all her other lovers.
Rebeca did not have the dreamless sleep she’d hoped for. She lay awake brooding about Mituco Company shares, or when she did sleep, dreamed about them, clouds of certificates fluttering like albino bats across her mind. The doctor lost rather than gained in notoriety. Mituco was not mocked or shocked for long, since quite soon after he took up with Rebeca he began to age markedly and, stranger still, varied ever less in his appearance, while the townspeople grew ever less disturbed and puzzled by him, concluding that he was no different than so many men of middle years who, trying to keep a younger woman, become incapable of controlling her. Men laughed behind his back and whispered that Rebeca must be leading him a terrible dance. He even became something of a figure for pity, another victim of Rebeca la fatal. This mutual frustration led, finally, to a realignment of positions, Dr. Burlando declared that he would give no less than twenty shares to any child of his Rebeca bore, Rebeca, naturally, to hold the shares in trust. He even signed an affidavit to this effect and had it notarized before the Comptroller of the Compañía de Progreso Infinito—an event which caused the town to suppose Rebeca already pregnant and notably redeemed the doctor’s reputation. Rebeca, for her part, set about to conceive.
First she tried to conceive some respect for Dr. Burlando, and with it the desire to give him heirs. Failing of this, she searched for some maternal yearnings, but the creative urge in her had been turned away from breeding and aimed at art. Then she went over to Mituco de Tierra Firme and consulted Señora Perfecta, a midwife and a witch, but Señora Perfecta refused to sell her a fertility charm, having read in Rebeca’s face (and confirmed the reading by inspection of her coffee grounds) that all her offspring would either be cripples or come to violent ends. Meanwhile Dr. Burlando toiled away like a field hand, night after night, glazed in sweat and rage, trying to trowel a child into her stony womb.
