The Dissertation, page 55
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
These cavities are the most exclusive lodgings provided by the Ministry of justice anywhere in Tinieblas. Special guests are stuffed into them head-first, face-up, and naked. The operation resembles the loading of a heavy artillery piece. Guards swing the guest into the breach and ram him home, the floor of the cavity being more or less lubricated by fungoid slime and by material left on it either by the previous occupant or by the guest himself if he has already spent some time inside and is returning from an interrogation session. The door is then slammed—on the guest’s ankles if he hasn’t yet learned to squidge himself in quickly or if interrogation has left him incapable of speedy movement. The door is slammed and slammed until it shuts. When it does, the guest is so snuggly cased around with walls that he is, in effect, part of the masonry of the building.
I was not prepared for this experience. The cavities are nowhere described in the civics texts assigned in our secondary schools, nor are they so much as mentioned in the brochures put out by the Ministry of Tourism. Like most law-abiding citizens, I had never bothered to inform myself about our institutions of social control, which I assumed were reserved for that mysterious, quasi-human species Other People. Then, too, I was dazed from the clocking Colonel Guadaña had given me and from the shock of being “naked to mine enemies.” I was thrust into that cavity in a state of utter, screaming panic—the same state, I imagine, as when I was first thrust into this world.
There I was, stripped to the skin, being prodded by yelling guards down a dimly-lit corridor two storeys below ground, and all at once the lead guard flung open a door in the wall, and the others seized me and lifted me and stuffed me in.
“Aaaaaaaaaaah!”
“In you go, asshole!”
Head and shoulders. Torso. Then they hold your knees straight, one on each leg, and push against your heels. Pure terror. Not even the most fragmentary, disconnected thoughts. You scarcely feel your head hit the far wall or hear the door slam shut. You hardly notice that a roach has dropped from the ceiling into your open, screaming mouth. You are kicking your legs just as wildly, mindlessly, and uselessly as he is.
People are accustomed, not without some cause, to consider the so-called underdeveloped countries inefficient, yet at the risk of sounding chauvinistic I here take the liberty of pointing out the speed and economy with which the Tinieblan Ministry of justice is able to transform a human being—e.g., a gifted, disciplined, superbly educated, and inordinately proud young man—into a bug.
Not permanently, at least not in my case. I descended to bughood, then rose, and then descended once again. I attained an animal awareness that my holemates were swarming all over me—pardonably, it seems to me at present since I had slid in on them without a by-your-leave, but nonetheless hideously. Later on I learned to clasp my genitals with one hand and brush my face with the other and to bear being infested and bitten in the remaining regions of my body, but my original reaction was to rub myself spastically wherever I could reach. Then I realized that the door was shut, that it would never again open, that I was never coming out, and that the entire prison was resting on my chest, pressing down so that I couldn’t breath, and I began to scream again and thrash against the walls in a total absence of mental and physical control.
But pardon me, long-suffering examiners. You’re not enjoying this. I can see you now, sitting in your clean and spacious offices, or in your no less comfy and spotless homes, pursing your lips in displeasure. Why, you surely wonder, should you have to read this sort of thing? What use is it to you? You will never break the law, and there will never be a tyranny in your marvelous country, so no one will ever bury you in a putrid prison hole. That’s for the Other People. And besides, you know those Other People are accustomed to abuse, that they don’t really mind it all that badly; although certain weaklings among them, Camilo Fuertes, for example, will squeal and squirm and soil themselves in a most disgusting fashion and then, long after the event, insist on nauseating decent folk with exaggerated accounts of their sufferings. All such stories must, you say, be exaggerated since their authors survived to tell them.
Well, perspicacious examiners, I shall grant a smidgen of your point. Perhaps I have painted the scene in tints a bit too somber. The place I was in—they call them “coffins” in La Bondadosa Prison—was a hideous, black, filthy place scarcely fit for the vermin that lived there by election. It certainly maximized a number of human antipathies, some built-in, some acquired through acculturation, such as fear of the dark, revulsion at slimy creeping things, hatred of filth, and horror of being constricted. It was, thus, frightfully unsuited for the retention of human dignity. But it had its silver lining. In my panicky thrashings I chanced to strike my forehead crisply on the stone, and having done so once, as it were fortuitously, I swung it up into the stone again, and then again, drawing down cleansing pain, and I repeated this maneuver deliberately until at length I grew calm. I was not, you see, completely helpless. My “coffin” left me free to knock some of the anguish out of me.
(You don’t get that kind of freedom in a strait jacket, by the way. In a strait jacket, you can’t move at all. You can’t rake your cheeks with your fingernails or pound your temples with your fists, and the walls are far away and, in any case, padded. On the other hand, a strait jacket protects your nakedness while it constricts you. In every terrestrial endeavor, even stripping folks of their humanity, each expedient, however worthy in and of itself, drags a defect along with it.)
I lay, then, naked on dank stone, entombed by walls and crept over by vermin, yet calmed by a restorative dose of pain.
Indulgent examiners, please bear with me. I know your tastes, but this is the closest I can come to an up-beat ending for this note.
89. My mother
My mother visited me last night while I was sleeping. She is greatly relieved that I have found such comfortable refuge and that my health is sufficiently restored for me to work, She is also pleased with Chapter 18 as I outlined it to her. Much of the material I had from her own lips either while she was in this world or after her “death” by heart cancer in 1966. Much I observed myself during my childhood. The rest comes from my father.
My mother was by my side during most of my stay in prison, but I couldn’t hear her voice. This was my fault, not hers, Her delicate spirit descended into the bowels of Bondadosa Prison to find and comfort me. She grieved beside me in my “coffin,” but I had denied her.
As soon as I calmed myself, I tried to beam my mind out to the Astral Plane, but I couldn’t concentrate. My mind fluttered weakly against the walls. If only I had been able to fling it up out of the pit! Other captives less practiced than I have done so and saved themselves, but shock had disabled me. I waited expectantly for the arrival of my Guardian Spirit. Then I despaired. My mother and my aunt Rosario and my grandmother Rebeca were all searching for me. My mind would have regained strength after a time. But I despaired. I gave myself up to self-pity. I judged myself abandoned by my gift and by my Guardian Spirit. I wept as though this and my imprisonment were universal calamities.
That was my diminished state when they took me for interrogation. I sat naked on a stool in a large, bare room, surrounded by guards and officers. Colonel Guadaña presided. The others regarded him with admiration, deference, and respect—similar, I suppose, to the treatment accorded Dr. Felix Heilanstalt by the personnel of his operating theater and visiting physicians (see note 61). My position was that of an object on which the master would now exercise his skill.
Colonel Guadaña said that while the extent of my criminality was not yet known, two counts were already clear: I had betrayed the Tinieblan state by obtaining the release of detained person on false pretense; I had personally insulted a minister. If there was one thing he had learned during his career, it was that corpses do not talk. Did I still maintain that I had received information from the corpse of Padre Celso Labrador?
I said I had received it from his spirit, not his corpse. I sat with my hands over my privates, shivering, though the room wasn’t cold. My statement sounded far-fetched even to my own ears. Such was my depression and despair that I no longer believed anything with much conviction.
Colonel Guadaña nodded and said, “Go ahead!”
I was seized at my legs and shoulders. A guard rushed forward holding a long-handled ball-peen hammer. He knelt down, grabbed my left ankle, and, snapping his wrist, brought the hammer down on my little toe, mashing it flat against the cement floor.
It was so fast I didn’t even scream. I was so shocked I hardly felt it. They released me. I looked down at my foot. It didn’t seem to belong to me, certainly not that red mush there at the corner. Then I grimaced, and moaned a little.
“Good,” said Colonel Guadaña. “Now I’ll ask you again. If you give the wrong answer, he’ll do exactly the same thing to your prick.”
Fear net, alarmed examiners. I didn’t wait for that. I didn’t even wait for him to put the question. I answered, and I did not answer wrong. I denied the human spirit. I denied the next world. I denied my gift. I denied all mystical experience, all nonmaterialist philosophy, and all the gods from Adonai to Zoroaster. I denied transmigration, metempsychosis, and every concept of immortality that had come to my attention over years of study. I denied ESP, PSI, psychokinesis, clairvoyance, precognition, and the entire science of parapsychology. I kept on babbling denials until Colonel Guadaña told me I could stop, and I did so not from any commitment to physical love or the life of this world as symbolized in reproduction or my own manhood—which might have been redeeming reasons—but from simple fear of pain and mutilation.
How’s that for efficiency, jingoist examiners? It had taken your supershrinks weeks to drag me to “reality,” and even then I came with tongue in cheek, yet the Tinieblan Minister of Justice snapped me out of my delusions in a matter of minutes, without using expensive apparatus either, and my cure was complete. I knew Colonel Guadaña meant what he said, and I answered with equal sincerity. Every syllable of my answer came from the bottom of my heart.
Then he wanted to know where I had learned the details of Padre Celso’s “death,” and I was stumped. Where had I learned them? All I knew for sure was where I hadn’t learned them. I hadn’t learned them from any spirit. There were no such things as spirits. Corpses don’t talk. When you’re dead, you’re dead, and no quote marks either. Fortunately, he gave me a hint. I had heard about it from a member of the Civil Guard, hadn’t I?
Oh, yes! Oh, yes! That was it!
From one of the men who’d been in the district headquarters cellar that night, correct?
Yes! Yes!
Well, then, who was it?
I wanted another hint, just to be sure I didn’t answer wrong, but I thought I saw him begin to glance in the direction of the fellow with the hammer, so I said the first name that came to mind: Calimba, Juan Calimba.
Then he wanted to know where and when and why, so I made up a trip to Belém and a stop-off at a cantina and a drunken Juan Calimba and some paragraphs of realistic dialogue. There was no end to the efficiency of the Tinieblan Ministry of justice and its chief officer: now they had transformed a historian into a hack novelist.
Next he asked me what I knew about the buses.
I told him I knew nothing, that I had pretended to know to get Liz out of jail, but I saw from his face that this was the wrong answer, so I said it was a counterrevolutionary conspiracy. I was the leader. No! The real leaders were foreigners. No! The leader was Alejandro Sancudo, the constitutional president whom Manduco had thrown out. He was in league with the Galactic Fruit Company, and I was in their pay. The counter-revolutionary propaganda was flashed onto the buses by laser beam from an orbiting satellite. It was worked by remote control from an underground bunker near Miami. Yes, yes, I would write it all down! If they would just give me a pencil and some paper!
When they put me back into my “coffin,” my sentiments were those expressed in the lines:
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Home at last, where no one could get at me with a hammer! It was fitting that I lie in my own excrement and be companied by vermin, my next of kin. It is proper that the dead be buried.
Access to Learning is contingent on commitment to the truth, so my enlistment had been revoked—and my life emptied of purpose. I no longer believed in anything, so I could not hear my mother’s voice when she came to me. all I could hear, in fact, was my own whimpering.
I thought I had touched bottom before. Ha!
90. Departure
I can’t say how long I stayed there. The door was opened three or four times, but I don’t know at what intervals. I would scrunch back as far as I could get and shield my face from the light and lie quivering as someone pushed in a piece of bread and a plastic cup of water. When the door had closed and I had calmed again, I would drink the water. I didn’t eat.
I didn’t think either. Electroencephalography tells us that the fetal mind is active, and my mind may have been active in that way. Freud and others claim to recall intrauterine experiences—and such claims argue a form of fetal thought—but they are probably kidding themselves, if not us, Before my interrogation I spent some time considering the motives that had led me from the refuge of my work into action, then prison. Immediately afterward I considered both the shame of having thrown away everything that gave my life some meaning and the satisfaction of being in my hole, but quite soon my thought processes shut down. So long as the door was shut, I was at peace.
They had to drag me out by main strength. I pressed my palms against the ceiling and dug my fingernails into the stone, and, weak as I was, it took two of them, one pulling on each foot, to drag me out. On reflection, I don’t think my resistance was based solely on fear. The light was odious. That hole was as much my home as if I had burrowed it myself. I belonged there, not in the sight of people. A moldered corpse might, if it could, resist in the same fashion when dug up.
They dragged me to the small room beside the interrogation chamber where I had written my confession. I wouldn’t walk but didn’t struggle, and they each grabbed me by a bicep and a wrist and dragged me along the floor, grunting with the exertion. They put me on a stool beside the table. I sat there with my head bowed and my hands dangling between my knees.
After a while Colonel Guadaña came in alone. He was in uniform and carried a fiber attaché case, which he put down on the table and opened. When he looked at me, my head drooped again.
“Your confession has been typed. Also corrected. Look at me when I speak to you! It now includes your accomplices. Many members of ex-President Sancudo’s family and party were also involved, isn’t that so? Initial each page and sign it in the indicated place. You may also read it if you care to, but that isn’t necessary.”
He took a folder from his case and doubled the cover back. There was a sheaf of papers clipped inside. He held the whole thing forward toward me.
“The injury to your foot will be attended. You will be transferred to a regular cell and given the regular prison diet. Look at me when I’m speaking!” I raised my head a little and held out my hand for the folder. He took a pen out of his case and held it forth.
“Initial each page and sign at the place indicated.” He smiled as I took the pen.
Cherished examiners, he ought to have denied himself that smile. He ought, in fact, to have left me in my burrow. I was at peace there and would have caused no trouble. He might have had the papers handed in; I would have signed them. If, later on, he needed testimony from me at a trial, he might have run a phone down to my hole; I would have said whatever was required. Instead the fool had me dragged out. Instead the fool allowed himself to smile in confidence and satisfaction. I had seen an identical expression on the face of Dr. Elias Fafnir four years before. When I made the connection, I experienced what Saint Paul called “conversion” and Dr. I. P. Pavlov the “ultra-paradoxical phase.”
I had always resented the slightest annoyance on the fringes of my life. I would not suffer even those closest to me to bother me. I would not put up with the society of people who did not make a positive contribution to my private purpose. I tried—most usually with perfect success—to ignore the sufferings of others. I turned a blind eye to the tyrant in my country and the poacher in my home so that the delicious happiness I found in study might not be disturbed. Then, when that happiness was stripped from me, I made no murmur. I threw away the purpose of my life and was content in a foul hole. Now, though, all those responses were reversed. I no longer cared about protecting what I had. True enough, I had quite little. I lacked even a rag to cover me. I still had my life and youth, however, but I no longer cared about protecting them. I now cared about other things. I didn’t want others to end up where I was. I didn’t like Colonel Guadaña ‘s face. And—this was the main thing—my “confession” simply wasn’t true. I pulled it from the folder and tore it first in halves and then in quarters. As soon as I had done so, I saw my mother and my aunt Rosario and my grandmother Rebeca standing at my right hand, weeping.
“You are a moron,” I said to Colonel Guadaña.
“Take him inside!” he screamed, but as the guards laid hands on me, he screamed, “No! I’ll send him there myself!”
He stepped from behind the table, drew back against the wall, and then ran toward me, howling, “Penalty!” and aimed a kick at my face. His boot caught me just under the chin. I flew backward off the stool. My butt hit. My head snapped back and smashed on the stone floor with a sound like a melon dropped from a good height. My spirit left my body.
91. Reception
It requires but little thought to comprehend the problems faced by Astral Reception. Spirits arrive ceaselessly and in great numbers from every corner of this world. The immense majority are at once bewildered and scared out of their wits. The first step, therefore, is to put them somewhat at their ease.
