Читать книгу In Partial Disgrace - Charles Newman - Страница 11

FATHERLAND

(Iulus)

My father, Felix Aufidius, was an exceptionally energetic and experienced fellow, athletic, gregarious, and priapic, an intense and watchful man with enormous inner territory, infinitely careless yet terribly focused. A hard-drinking old depucelator, an homme de femme who got better-looking as he aged, his angular features were increasingly apparent in the faces of peasant children throughout the county of Klavier. And may I say it was disconcerting to encounter your own little doppelgangers playing in the dusty streets of every village, as I became gradually aware that in effect I was the unwilling leader of a lost tribe. Felix was a big warm man with a smooth cold cheek, often with a heart-shaped lipstick smudge where his beard began. I wished to exceed him only as a tippler and a flirt, and would have happily donned his poisoned shirt.

Born into that century when humankind never worked harder, Felix was known locally as the only Protestant east of the Mze, the quickest gestalt to the west of it, and also as something of a Marxisant—at least to the extent that he agreed that the aim of man was to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening and criticize after dinner.” He was the only man I ever knew who roared with laughter when in the clutches of Das Grosse Kapital. “There are certain mistakes, which only an intellectual can make,” he often said. And if he could have chosen his epitaph, it would have read: “He had brains but not too many.”

In his den (and that word sums it up perfectly), a black velvet curtain bisected the oak-paneled tower suite, on each side of which he pinned quotes from his favorite authors, which he made me memorize, such as this one from the down-to-earth Red Prussian:

In place of the great historic movements arising from the conflict between the productive forces . . . in place of practical and violent action by the masses . . . in place of this vast, prolonged and complicated movement, Monsieur Proudhon supplies the evacuating motion of his own head.

I was in my fifties before I got the gist of that, near Felix’s own age when he clipped it. It was a reminder note that the most difficult intellectual work of all is like that of an unperplexed matador—to allow reality to step forward, then coolly sidestep it.

And I see now that the rote tutorial was apt, for our sensation of history is indeed nothing more than a great black velvet curtain onto which, along with a few sepia cupolas, haunting autoportraits, and vanished landscapes, a great number of pithy quotes have been flimsily pinned. Yet it is only against that opaque curtain of garbled out-of-context aphorisms that individual character can be truly developed, and those who refuse to stand before it never really emerge. Best to ponder it at midnight with some absinthe before a roaring fire.

My greatest joy was rifling through my father’s papers, from which I quickly ascertained that, as heir to Semper Vero, I could look forward to a veritable mountain of debt and virtually exponential taxes; and that my role in the world would be to default, if not gracefully, then with a kind of amusing aplomb, emerging from bankruptcy standing on one finger. Cannonia was the only country in the world where the ledgers were kept in real time, the only government that hadn’t learned to cook its books, and it was my generation from whom the debts of centuries would be called. Felix obviously knew this to be the case, and he also knew he could do nothing whatsoever to protect me, so he indulged my sullenness knowing it would run its course, as well as my acrobatic refusal of something as useless as an identity based on pride of ownership.

No, in spite of his agnosticism, his will contained the most terrible of Christian laws. The Father judges no one. He turns the judgment over to the Son. It is up to him not only to forgive, but pay the debt in full. I wasn’t up to either, and we both knew it.

One day I came across a copy of a letter from my father apologizing to a client . . . “for I must rush home, I so miss my infant son.” Think of that. That there might be something in me he might miss gave me a ridiculous sense of self-confidence, as well as a certain hauteur, and I pinned the purloined letter to the black velvet curtain, nailed it to the cross, between the expostulations of dead patriarchs.

Having mastered his profession early, my father, like most of his class, was unafraid to throw himself without limit into his hobbies, and he was more than content to play the amateur amongst his professional friends. A career could not be sustained any more than any passion, he believed, and so “real life” for him was a respectful if somewhat self-indulgent sideline, the only aim of which was to extract value. He was the sort of person who found irreverence and defiance irresistible, and as the possessor of what one could only call great moral charm, he was proud to take his place as a contrarian crank in a technological, profane, ego-based, and psychologically-oriented world, and mow his lawn on the principles of the Parthenon. Most anyone can orchestrate, but he could retranscribe, reduce a symphony to a quartet. In his heart he had both a sliver of ice and a sliver of gold.

My father’s idea of spirituality was to be in touch with matter and the way it moved, a hands-on mysticism which could have been lethal. For him, touch was the only performance of lasting duties. “If your hands and mouth are wise,” he told me when we first discussed the birds and bees, “virility will take care of itself. And you will seduce all the world, if you like.” He had three golden rules: 1. Ride women high. 2. Never take the first parachute offered. 3. Never go out, even to church, without a passport, 1500 florins, and a knife.

Semper Vero was crossed by the continental divide, marked by a mound made of earth brought in from sixty-three different countries in Grandfather Priam’s time, and not far from there, the Dead Mze broke up and darted underground, emerging again to die in peace one thousand miles away in some Russian marsh. This strange system was most visible at dawn, when the Cannonian countryside appears striped, the underground serpentine aquifers showing up as green squiggles in the sere pastures. In our part of the world, the Living Mze often changed directions, at the whim of its dead, diverted underground cousins, sometimes flowing East and sometimes West, a hydraulics as mysterious as those of the urinary tract, the only human system which remains unexplained by science.

Father was hardly surprised at this. “Nature is apprehended only by asking it a question,” he said to many an astounded visitor. “The river, like time, may flow both ways, but the point is that whichever way it flows, it runnels back into the past before it emerges in the future.”

Often a visitor, beset by literary aspirations, would attempt to amplify the liquid analogy. Count Zich, who knew better, one day tried his hand: “So would you say then, sir, that life is walking alongside a river which gradually disappears?”

“Experience is not a river,” Felix gently riposted. “Experience is countless rivers converging in a damp place, where there is nothing which could be said, in any helpful sense, to be a river.”

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, to find that a man who first thing each morning (with a rifle slung over his shoulder and a book under his arm) checked to see if the river of Grace had decided to flow east or west, might be simultaneously a believer and an unbeliever, a romantic and a moderate, a stoic and an epicure, a yogi without meditation, deadly serious about his whimsies, humorous about death and taxes, reflective and decisive in the same gesture. He was interested in the minimally implausible, and believed that the function of the intellect was to set stern limits to its own pretensions. He had the skepticism of the peasant, the indifference of the nobleman, and the insistence on value-by-critique of the country gentry, and so lived voluntarily in a no-man’s-land on the borders of the intelligentsia, the Astingi nomads, the lesser aristocracy, and bureaucratic squires, thinking of himself as an intermediary metabolite. He was basically interested in secondary differential, a student of nothing so insipid as change, but of changes in the rate of change; not only in the gray-green river, but in the human métabole as well. How does one thing become another? That was his métier. What exactly is it that the hero doesn’t know before he becomes, well, quite something else? That was his subject. What is the opposite of an epiphany? That was his method. What is the opposite of a hangover? That was his temperament. Born when the voluntary sublime virtues were being replaced by the vulgar obligatory ones, he was still of that amorous tradition, unimaginable to modern ears, in which the desire to please was stronger than the need to be loved. A refugee from smugness, from conformity, and from every chosen people, he was the least guileless of men.

He never wasted a word. Either he was telling you something you wanted to know, or you were telling him something he wanted to know, and the ironclad integrity of these encounters somehow never became tiresome. He had a quiet baton, sparing of the superfluous, and an inscrutable beat.

Imagine the difficulty of having a father who was exactly as he seemed to be.

Father rejected the fashionably tragic and the abnormal, condemned all cults of solitude and unhappiness. As an anglophobophile, he loved people who teased the British. He loathed German misery, German inwardness, German desperation. He particularly loathed Kant for his hierarchies, which placed the dog and the horse somewhere between a stone and us. As an incorrigible improviser, his expansive gaiety of mind struggled against the fathomless boredom which always threatened to strangle our part of the world. Above all, he resolutely denied the cults of Life-Affirmation and Life-Alienation, those elusive twin personages who have washed each other’s hands throughout our dirty century. Yet in his Historae Astingae he was always trying to rescue Nietzsche from being “so damned Nietzschean”; he wanted to tell his tale from the point of view of the brown mare, around whose neck the author of Superman had flung his arms as he died.

No culture has ever made so much and so little of art than the Cannonia of his time. And he was after all, a member of that class—handsome, balanced, and relatively well-off; civic-minded, tolerant, sociable, and progressive—that really had no need of art, and as such ended up as its main patron and audience. Even though they napped through most of it, they somehow didn’t miss a thing. Felix himself was devoted to art while loathing its egotism and vanity. As the most self-reliant of men he knew that autonomy was always overrated. He did not understand why art, when it enjoined any civic impulse, always seemed to degenerate into toadying vapidity, nor why the relentless quest for originality almost always resulted in pointless savagery, lack of sex appeal, and predictable abuse. He was equally amused by what both the clowns of the ruling classes and the damaged narcissists of the avant-garde called thinking. If he was the product of a no longer comprehensible past, to compensate, he prided himself on being a child of his own age. His only real mistake was to think he could compel beauty, and yet he was the only man I ever knew before whom a failed author could sit with ease.

Felix “the Happy” spent most of his time keeping several sorts of overlapping daybooks. The first was what merchants call a klitterbuch (wastebook) in which they inscribe everything that is bought and sold that day, as well as naked thoughts on matters literary and scientific, all of these muddled in no particular order. These were in turn transferred into a journal where everything was made more systematic and the kurb of art began to exert its salubrious effect—a record of his real-time monetary expenditures in the margins of a diary, and further annotated with a meditation on what he might have done. And finally, all this was transfigured into a kind of double-entrance bookkeeping, a Chronik in which the text, “the history of my feelings,” was coextensive with columns of numbers in each margin—one marking the prices of the trading day, another the costs of transactions, and still another, a kind of pictographic evaluation of the psychic experience, as well as symbols for the occasions on which he had made love. The method, as I understood it, was to firmly differentiate the semi-articulate from reinvention, finally producing both an intimate account and its quantification, a natural history of the heart paralleling natural history; the long account of the death of a favorite animal, for example, with the price history of horsemeat in France alongside.

He ignored the daily newspapers in order to try and think historically. He could have produced five or ten books as good as those any literary culture of any country can turn out by the thousands. But he knew we were entering the age of weakening reality, so in order to assert value in an objective world which denied it, he preferred to accompany the commentary out to the dread edge of the page, where the argument became clearer as it became less systematic—attempting to approximate those pre-philosophical sputterings which had not yet been trifled with by Plato or Aristotle, before they had been stitched into myths and stories, when thoughts were really fragments, and the gap between them clear and enticing, not a pile of rhetorical milk bottles to be bowled over by some howling semanticist. My father had no ideas marching through him; he liked it out there on the edge, where the bardic collided with the calligraphic, a small forbearing space where the paltriness of intelligence might be momentarily overcome, where one could write in order to stop thinking, and lose the shame of being an author.

The confidently unrealizable project of his Chronik allowed him to gather strength and move fully formed and with accord. When making an investment for a client, he could turn back twenty years and not only see the historical value of the commodity he was trading, but more importantly, judge his own frame of mind at the time, as well as what the poor dazed world was thinking. From a distance, the Chronik looked like an oriental book, each page transcribed in a different colored ink, a palimpsest strewn with ciphers and perfumed with annotations spiraling off into space. But when you put your face in it, you knew what day it was, what world you were in, and what it felt like before you were born.

In the courtroom, Felix “the Happy” learned that you can destroy any argument by taking the a priori one step backward, that the self and its opposite do not have to exist in mutual antipathy, and indeed that the day of liberation is most often the day of disappointment. Observing the inclination of human nature to crush the human spirit, he reluctantly became the advocate of the trial-and-error boys, reconciling warring factions by insisting that the other’s place does not have to be a fearful one. He often said there are only two sorts of people in this world—those who believe in the law when it promises to protect them, and those who don’t.

No graven portrait of my father’s family ever hung in our house. If there was a tradition operating here, it was that one ought to be forthright in pursuing and preserving one’s pleasures, but not be surprised if others found them repulsive. This quirky toleration always made a great impression in our fanatical part of the world, but was essentially misunderstood. For if a man had his absolute preferences, and yet could afford another’s right to take exception, this implied authority—and such authority could only imply hoarded money, dirty tricks, or a conspiracy at the highest level. An uncaused authority without political power and without money, together with an uncaused freedom without an enemy, is the most intimidating force in the modern world, and its bearers are inevitably punished for it. Felix was one of those men doomed to be more liberal than his class, and his political downfall was due to his not being as conservative as the radicals turned out to be.

Father clearly preferred the companionship of women, as he believed that everything is finally done either to impress or avoid them. “Men just walk down their own roads,” he used to say, “and talk about the things they happen to meet. How unbelievably boring! Women, for whatever reason, tend to do this less, and are therefore superior.” He also believed that the greatest gift you can give another person is self-control, and that the ability of men to hide their thoughts went largely unappreciated by women.

Life for him was clearly a beautiful woman on a beautiful horse led by a beautiful dog, and he felt the only possible justification for something as unattractive and exceptional as a grown man was that by wizardry and chivalry he might keep these unlike animals together in a parade—that gentleman’s paradise: tenderness without loyalty, violence without strife.

His male acquaintances found it strange that such an energetic man did not chafe in a house under female ownership, particularly given the airy standards of my mother, for married life was certainly nothing like a ballerina on a circus horse, but rather more a warren of untrained animals and mentally ill clowns. They also thought it imprudent for him to reinvest all of his earnings into the maintenance of a property which for all its strange beauty and uniqueness, had for a century been a wasting asset, producing less income each year. (Indeed, the whole of Cannonia would have doubled in market value had they shut down every single farm and factory.)

My father was a triple functionary—attorney, village notary, and investment counselor—with a triple soul: conservative, liberal, and left wing. He was not hard to fathom, not so much a giant of a man as three hard, distinct men who fought spiritedly among themselves. He was a worldly concrete man, adept at finance, ball games, and sex, contemptuous of politics and religion, but a spy for the spiritual, a secret agent for the sacred. He believed sincerely that his function was to play prime minister to the queen, bluff front man for the skeptical muse, to extract money from the real economy and cheerfully recirculate it into the inefficient, living part of the culture. As such, he objectively failed at everything except the high drama of marriage and as fiduciary for other people’s money. But it was in the fourth dimension of Dogmeister Supreme, Hauptzuchtwart of Semper Vero and Master of Our Floating World, where Father truly shone, and scattered the heaped-up mountains with the simplest of gestures. A man is nothing but a handful of irrational enthusiasms, and nothing in this world can be understood apart from them.

Yes, my father was an oral man, a primary type, who could not resist a smoke, a vowel, a puff, a sentence, a sweet, a scotch, a song, a smooch. Breathing, after all, was no less a project because it was involuntary, and the intervals between the breaths also required justification and refinement. This attitude, more than any gustatory prowess, accounted for Father’s eating habits, which went far beyond gourmet or even the gourmand.

Family meals in Father’s view were an especial kind of torture, a fact borne out by his observation of the dogs when they were fed in the same cell. There, the bitches inevitably lost their appetite or became more aggressive, barking out commands which fell on deaf ears, though requiring ever sharpening levels of feigned attention from the brood. The sires sat proudly, horrified to eat from the same bowl as their progeny, insensitive to the alleged thrill of watching newborns masticate, and trying pathetically to nose their own dishes into a corner where they could be defended. When they were half-grown, the dogs ate just as sloppily, gulping their food without tasting it, and reverting to the pecking order they had displayed as puppies; indeed the same dogs who shoved each other out of the way at eight weeks continued to do so at eight years.

A line seemed to be crossed at our meals, from wonder to pride to habituation to vague resentment and finally colic. There was nothing like a repast to bring out the hierarchies that everyday activities so successfully blurred and dispelled, and Father came to believe that a true family could be kept together only by avoiding meals together whenever possible. But he had also noticed that there was better behavior at kennel dinner when a guest dog was being boarded. Were the hosts being well-mannered or falsely solicitous, wondering whether the guest was going to steal their dinner? Whatever the case, their own self-conscious roles were slightly submerged; they gulped more slowly, ate a bit less, chewed a bit more thoroughly. There was even a kind of comradely charm in the air, and occasionally a note of sincere thanks was struck, bringing a tear to a hound’s eye.

So it was that we almost always had an invited guest for supper. When we did not, our table was the severest form of regimen. Mother was obviously of two minds about food. Meat in particular, in all its forms, gave her the shakes. She would walk across a muddy street to avoid passing the window display in a butcher shop. She knew this was ridiculous but couldn’t help it. It was related of course to the way my father had eaten, was eating, and was about to eat. The appetites of men seemed to her if not exactly vulgar, driven by needs far beyond nutrition. The way men left the table particularly offended her, on whatever pretext, strolling over to the fire, or to walk in the starry moonlight, there to smoke, pass wind, and put the dinner out of mind. It brought out in her conflicting feelings of servitude and superiority, particularly when they thanked her with pointless magnanimity for the meal she had in fact nothing to do with. She was convinced that Father’s love of food was his most prurient of interests.

Mother’s attention to lettuce and other uncooked food struck Father as not only gratuitous, smug asceticism, but also willful self-destructiveness. He did not judge her, as he himself took no pleasure in the carving, nor certainly in the presiding. It was one of the few rituals he was not particularly good at, and he was embarrassed at his first reflex, which was always to carve the roast in such a way that the better cuts would be preserved for himself. Gazing with sadness at the selfishly severed loin, he would offer it shamefacedly to Mother, who he knew would refuse it, saying, “You know I just don’t care, dear”—the only words which truly threatened him. And then he would fork the filet on to me, and that was Judgment Day, where amongst the copious portions you simply cannot offer thanks enough. It is the smallest and the weakest of us who must get down on our marrowbones and give thanks, who must tally up with the Lord, his beneficence.

So our supper was not a pretty picture. Father with his huge knife raised in defeat, Mother staring at every plate but her own, and myself, who through murmurs of gratitude, personal growth, and savoir gré, was presumed to solve this impasse. Only the animals beneath the table enjoyed these coarse dog dinners, as my father’s shadow hovered over the roast, elbows sawing in and out, while mother withdrew from his shadow with an unmistakable air of superiority. In my nervous knowledge that my digestion was the only justification of the elaborate ritual, I must admit that I identified with the roast and rejoiced in its slaughter. But these meals drenched in ambivalence did not give us strength. No, this first festival of mankind made each of us weaker, occasionally exhausted—the family values of remorse, obedience, and guilty liberation, all sitting round the table in silence.

So it was not surprising that when there were no guests to take the edge off things, Father would invariably take his supper at that vegetarian’s nightmare, White Wings, Black Dog, an inn where the fare was certainly uneven but which had not been closed a single day in seven hundred years, and where no meal was really a meal without a seduction or apology. There in a booth in the private dining room known as The Brainery, one could draw the curtain and have an assignation with an oyster and one’s self, or perhaps the elk and bustard pie with orchid ice cream. And there Felix removed himself with a book and ate alone before the fire, his unembarrassed appetites on full display, and all of us grew fat and happy.

When earthbound, my father assumed three forms: at times a gentle bull who lay his full weight upon the fence of every friendship; at times a writhing, glittering serpent, mocking each blow of his adversaries; and at times a man with a lion’s head from whose laughing beard, unchecked by false shame, great torrents of water flowed. I liked them all.

At dusk, every summer afternoon, when the slow moving Mze turned from ocher to mauve, we stripped down on its banks, leaving my school uniform and his business suit in soft columns above our shoes, and began to wade aimlessly in our black alpaca bathing suits, which we always wore instead of underwear. Swallows swooped down, dipping their wings into the darkening waters, fish rose and rejoiced in its dusky surface, while between them all manner of insects emerged like living sparks and fell into the flowers of both banks. Then he would take me up in his arms and we would cross that river which the ancients believed to be bottomless.

He had the body of a gymnast, his frame developed by secret French exercises, low sloped rounded shoulders which concealed effortless strength, and the legs of a country gent, hard as a saddle but just as forgiving, which he toughened by rising at five each morning and walking for three hours before breakfast with a knapsack full of stones. I had my mother’s rapier-like body, designed for sleeping late, for sports not yet generally acknowledged. But when he picked me up, even for a moment, I forgot my body, forgot myself.

The incline of the river bottom was firm and fairly gradual, and soon we were submerged, only his head above the water, his beard like a dark water lily floating above my head, which lay upon his chest. I was aware of both the current and his stubborn resistance to it. Taking a breath, I went under with his heart. I felt no fear as long as he could breathe, as long as I could hear his breathing.

He walked almost casually, with the slight limp of the star athlete, negotiating the cylinder of water with short languid strides, suave and incorporeal, until we were both well beneath the surface. How many steps I do not know, across the bottom of that river which flowed away from history, where I first became aware of Time Out of Mind.

We moved deliberately in that sphere, out of our element but serene, moving gravely but never grimacing through the invisible currents. Down there, all the senses were equally irrelevant, in a normal weightless gait. Then in order to reassert our gravitas, he freighted, weighted down with me.

When his lungs close by my ear expelled, I knew we were coming up for air, that the incline was in our favor. There was nothing but blinding brightness as my own head emerged, and he permitted himself a slight stumble now that the hardest part was done. When we were in the shadows on the far side, my diminished senses returned one by one. I could hear the rivulets course about his calves, and as I was set down on the meadow embankment, looking back at the bent grass where we began, water cascaded down his beard onto my face.

The pretext, I suppose, was exercise, a kind of fitness. For surely, any fool can learn to swim, and in your mind’s redshot eyes one can just as well walk upon the water. But to walk through it, neither floating nor drowning, now that is a test—though the choleric Cannonian is sure to ask, what good is it to be a champion sprinter in a swimming pool?

I cannot recall exactly when this project began or ended, or how to factor in the crude determinants: my weight, his age, the velocity of the current as Time flowed back and forth. Read into it what you will. Read anything but comedy or dread. He cast me into the river which rose not over me; I was then what I was to be. As I saw the man pick the boy up, I was being picked up. From the water I saw the man carry the boy into the water. As the bubbles from my nostrils ascended to the surface, I saw the two beneath the riverine sheet, as if from a dirigible. From the far mountain bank I saw them clamber out of the river, then look back at the broken columns of their clothes. And from our clothes I saw the naked man and hairless boy turn to stare at me, then lay down like animal spirits in the mud.

How was it that in his arms, in that river, I was both behind and ahead of myself? Philosophers call this an affliction, and perhaps it is so. But I also know that no man can take leave of his father without it; I was where I had been for all time and where for all time I shall go.

From my father, who became a different man each day, I learned we have no choice but to be both hunter and prey. I saw that the bad boy becomes a good father as the best kind of cover. Even as the bad boy always remains bad, and gets badder still, the father’s guise is perfected. Like my father, I wanted desperately to be good. So I could be really bad.

My father was not on intimate terms with me; he was but a voice, an encouraging voice, let it be said, warm and straightforward, with never a catch. He talked like a book and rarely crossed out a line. He encouraged me to do what I wanted, on the condition that he would not have to pretend to be interested in it, and that I would not lie about it. I have lied to everyone but my father, which I trust was not good enough for him, but for him, nonetheless. When it became clear, however, that this world could not be passed on to me, he gave me some advice which I now pass on to you: 1. Neither marry nor wander, you are not strong enough for either. 2. Do not believe any confession, voluntary or otherwise. And most importantly, 3. Maxime constat ut suus canes cuique optimus. (Everyone has a cleverer dog than their neighbor; that is the only undisputed fact.)

And perhaps that is why I have never owned a dog, and even shy away from strangers’ pets, for every dog I see signifies to me a missed opportunity. My father kept a daybook every day of his life but one, not a record of the weather or personal experiences or even facts, but to keep faith with a complete record of one’s misfortunes. I, on the other hand, have erased each day with equal ledger-bound determination, all too often seeking with my exaggerations a forgetfulness of an all-too-faithful memory. But if I could not carry on my father’s punctilious bravery, and join the chorus of exalted apologists for heroic and intense living, I could do the one thing he could not do for himself. I could run away for him.

Sleeping beneath the reed beds, his head in the opposite direction of other pike, I was leaning on the Wodna Mze, my amphibian Waterman, the sorrowing seducer who shoots upwards from the abyss, his hiding place, and bolts through swine-clouds of semen to the dream of the double life.