The Solitary Twin

by Harry Mathews

  Berenice: “But what about Malachi?” “I declined his proposal as courteously as I could. Naturally, I never saw him again.” “Don’t you even know his last name?” “It’s infuriating. I’ve forgotten it, and every time I try to remember it, the only thing that turns up is that the proportion of consonants to vowels in his name is 7 to 2 — somewhat unusual, but not all that unusual, and no help at all in getting his name back.” “But you must have taken some interest in him.” “I emailed him once (at malachi2@gmail.com — I remember that). His answer gave me hope he might be slipping out of the stranglehold of his past. He’d let a princess move in with him. But not a Jewish princess — a shiksa! How about that? Now, who goes next?”

  7

  Geoffrey’s question would go unanswered for the next two weeks. Captain Kipper kept his promise to alert Wicheria and did so promptly. She phoned Berenice and Andreas two days after Geoffrey had told the tale of Malachi. She suggested meeting them at the Hunting Horn — “the food’s not great but not bad and they have a pretty good combo.” Were they free next Saturday? “I’m working nights till then, Sunday I’m meeting friends up the coast. I really want to talk to you about the two boys. My guess is you may have the wrong take on them.” Andreas and Berenice agreed to Saturday at 9 p.m.

  Andreas had an earlier date that same day: lunch with Geoffrey, who at the Malachi dinner had agreed to explain why he had given up the kingdom of poetry for life in an office. They met at a seafood restaurant reputed for its shellfish chowders and its deep-sea stews. Andreas was as curious as ever about Geoffrey’s transformation. At that moment, nothing could have been farther from Geoffrey’s mind. As he sat down he was almost giggling with excitement over some new event which, he insisted, he had to tell Andreas about. Andreas: “You as much as promised —” “And I’ll keep my promise. But first —” “At least explain one small thing.” “If I have to.” “What did you mean by ‘your chain-mail pajamas’?” “Oh, that! It was a silly kind of portmanteau metaphor, as if not telling my secret was like hiding inside a suit of armor, but it wasn’t solid armor just chain mail, and not even a suit, just pajamas. I was only poking fun at myself for being such a ninny, not telling friends like you, not even telling Margot. I thanked you for putting an end to such nonsense. Will that do?” “Sure. So what’s got you so agitated today?”

  “Do you know Sean Davies?” “The alderman?” “The alderman. As you know, we have no mayor, not officially, and Sean comes closest to being the unofficial one. He’s given me lots of support as a saboteur of bureaucratic routine. He asked me to meet him yesterday morning at Willy Aherne’s office.

  “We happened to arrive at the same time, and before we went in, he pointed out to me an unusual sight. In front of what looked like a private house what you call a doorman was standing, in full doorman regalia, as if he were lording it over the entrance to some grand Fifth Avenue hotel. But the house wasn’t even a boarding house, no more than a three-story slim-fronted place that I’d never even noticed. ‘Never seen that anywhere,’ was Sean’s comment.

  “Inside Willy’s office we found more aldermen. Straight off I saw they were all part of our ‘don’t wait till it’s broke to fix it’ clan, as opposed to the partisans of ‘let sleeping dogs lie,’ our very wet (as you say) antagonists. We were meeting that morning to confirm our majority on the town council for creating an innovation unit in the town government.

  “Do you know what an innovation unit is? It’s sometimes called an innovation lab, or team, or an incubator, an accelerator, a nudge unit, and so forth. They’re all pretty much the same. The best big companies started having them years ago, and now public bodies are starting to use them as well. In most cases a few chosen employees are extracted from their daily grind and told to go out and find ways of renovating the world. I backed the local initiative from the gitgo; Sean and a couple of others came on board pretty soon and as of this morning we’re sure of our majority on the council.

  “So far so good. But having a majority to vote for an idea is one thing, finding one to raise taxes wouldn’t be so easy. We have to look for the money elsewhere, which means borrowing it in the financial markets; theoretically that’s feasible but there aren’t many precedents, especially in the matter of guarantees — we could hardly use the town’s treasury as collateral.

  “It was, nevertheless, the town treasurer who intervened in our discussion of possible solutions and ended it: ‘I believe I can lead you to someone who will know how to get the money’; and preceding us out of the building, where do you think he carried us but across the street to the place with the doorman! Who, after a few words with the treasurer, let us all inside, where we were taken in by a Warden of the Interior Domain and led into a spacious if rather Spartan office at whose center, standing to greet us with a broad smile and outstretched arms, was a slender gentleman whom I immediately recognized as Michael Bloomberg. His presence in our remote town was known to few of us; he apparently visited it incognito from time to time because he appreciated the pragmatic good sense with which it ran itself. Some of us knew of his enthusiasm for innovation labs — Bloomberg Philanthropies had funded several.

  “After an exchange of courtesies and encomiums, Mr. Bloomberg quickly rescued our project from the realm of virtuality by offering, first, to make us a small but significant loan to show that he seriously backed our initiative, and second, to sign an agreement to personally cover the interest on any bank loans our group took out. ‘It sounds generous, but I assure you it won’t cost me a cent. You’ll have my loan to start with, and as well as paying your star researchers to invent the future, you’ll start a few very small businesses that generate cash streams — I’ll give you specifics another time, things like health kiosks and dating services. Then you’ll be able to make the interest payments yourselves, and meanwhile my notorious name will make the banks feel virtuous and safe — that’s a bank’s definition of happiness. Your worries are over.’ And next day — today — when we had breakfasted together, we aldermen went in a body to the bank. To all three banks. We didn’t want to cause any hard feelings. There were absolutely no hard feelings to be seen. Our bankers insisted we were doing them a favor in requesting these Bloomberg-hallowed loans. They offered us more than we wanted, more than we needed. We went out into the world as elated as schoolboys who’ve been given a surprise half-holiday. Sean is calling a meeting of the whole council next week. We’ll wake up those sleeping dogs with a shameless blast. That’s what happened, dear Andreas, before I met you here. What do you think of ‘innovative matrix’ as a name for our unit?”

  “I do get one point. You’re happiest working with people. I’m happy you got what you want and I can’t wait to see where you’ll go with it. I still can’t see why what happened in Paris made you quit writing poetry. You could have had two careers — there was Wallace Stevens/insurance executive, William Carlos Williams/country doctor, and now there’s Geoffrey Hyde/trade expediter (or whatever you call yourself).” “But it couldn’t work like those others. Here’s what happened.

  “I came back to Paris about May 10th. I told you how astonished I was. I’d gone to New York a month before hoping to get a first collection of my poems into print. No luck with that. Then after the police occupied the Sorbonne (a sanctuary since the Middle Ages), the student-worker revolt began. The American press as usual got everything wrong — the usual student riots or civil war, with De Gaulle as their main target. I didn’t yet know what was going on, but I’d been close to people involved in the demos that led up to May to be sure it wasn’t what I was reading in the papers. Also I was worried about a cousin, a woman I was very fond of, and when she didn’t answer half a dozen phone calls, I went back to Paris, via Brussels with a rental car. (Crossing the French border was a breeze. The immigration officers had joined the general strike, which by then was closing down pretty much the whole country.)

  “I arrived on a clear warm spring evening. I was
in my apartment eating a picnic supper when repeated explosions began rattling my quiet neighborhood. My friend Sarah Plimpton happened to phone me. She was pleased I was back and quickly realized I had no clue to what was happening. She offered to give me a tour. She arrived a few minutes later, and we walked the two blocks to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where a seemingly endless crowd of cheerful, mostly young people was proceeding at a lively clip toward (Sarah told me) the Chamber of Deputies. We had slipped into the cortege. Slogans were chanted, by a few at first, quickly taken up by many. A frequent one that night was ‘Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands!,’ which Sarah explained (never mind!). At the corner of Rue de Lille everyone came to a halt. The CRS had stopped our progress with so-called ‘defensive grenades’ — the ones with tear gas. Sarah: ‘This happens every day. They watch us building barricades and getting ready to march, and as soon as we start, they charge. Very strange!’ Our fellow-marchers’ high spirits were not dampened by this failure.

  “During the days that followed I rarely noticed any sense of failure. For one thing, everybody was having too good a time. Everybody was full of confidence as well. They felt they were winning. After all, they controlled a big part of the Left Bank. The CRS (‘Republican’ riot police) always pulled back from their tear-gas victories during the night. And whatever happened, people seemed to be learning all the time, taking in new ideas and passing them along as fast as they could. Naturally there were the leftist clichés about class war and solidarity with the unions, but mostly the slogans celebrated individual joy and celebration. Something new had shown up. It was my cousin, Tam, who let me in on the secret. Among the usual competitors for revolutionary authority — dissident communists, Trotskyists, feminists, radical Catholics, anarchists — a movement known as the Situationists, mainly working behind the scenes, had somehow secreted their succulent, subversive vaccines into the mind and soul of this new rebellion.

  “The Situationists were best known for their practice of deviation, which meant putting objects or activities to uses for which they hadn’t been intended — my favorite example was an American porn film in which all the lines of dialogue had been replaced with maxims from the Little Red Book of chairman Mao. The main target of the movement wasn’t late capitalism or neo-fascism, it was hierarchy of any kind. All previous revolutions had overthrown one hierarchy only to replace it with another just as bad and often worse. It wasn’t enough to get rid of capitalist hierarchies, all social and political hierarchies had to be axed as well. (The PCF, the French communist party, which was run by Stalinists, did not take the Situationists to their bosom.) The only way to make sure this happened was for revolutionary action to become permanent. Direct democracy was the rule of the day, which was perhaps why everybody involved in the May outbreak was having so much fun. If you came up with a great idea, you found you had the power to make things happen, at least until somebody with a better idea came along.

  “Here’s how I got involved. When I landed in Brussels, I rented a Mini Cooper. Knowing of the gas shortage in France (service stations had shut down as part of the general strike), I filled up the back seat and trunk with seven full jerry cans. Once I’d settled into life in Paris — one or two demos were enough to make me want to join the party (and I don’t mean the PCF!) — I wondered what kind of a contribution I could make. It would have to be inconspicuous; foreigners caught tossing paving stones were bundled out of the country within hours. Perhaps my little car and a respectable supply of gas might be useful. One morning I went to the Censier branch of the Sorbonne to offer my services — that’s where the student-workers action committee was headquartered.

  “When I walked into the main building I was treated to a surprise. The high walls of the entrance hall had been painted from floor to ceiling with blackboard paint. Lines of text had been chalked over the entire surface. They were full of new ideas for the ‘ongoing revolution’ and instructions for applying them. The language was elegant and sharp. I took out my little camera hoping to record some of it. I was promptly stopped by a young man nearby: no photographs. I told him these perishable sentences were too good to lose. He said he understood, but what was written on the walls wasn’t meant for the ages, it was meant for today and today only. True enough — when I came back the next day, all the words I’d seen had been erased and new ones equally inspiring had taken their place. I felt a slightly horrified respect for the volunteers who’d given up a night’s sleep to get this work done. That was Situationism in action.

  “The student-workers committee asked me to drive a couple of their members to factories a hundred kilometers or so from Paris. These were places where no reliable information about the uprising was available. I made five of these trips over the next ten days. We had only a few hours at our destinations to spread the good word, not enough to have had much effect — the ‘unions’ in these factories were usually set up by management, with in-house security systems to get rid of troublemakers. But what happened in the car on the way out and back almost made up for our disappointments. I traveled with three new passengers each time; invariably one of the three, while full of enthusiasm for our cause, would be stuck in some dumb hang-up that he’d be better off without. On the drive out, the remaining three of us would give our victim free rein to develop his nasty foolishness, so we were well prepared to bludgeon it to death on the way home. The roadsides of several autoroutes were littered with the corpses of homophobia, machismo, family values, and racism (mainly toward Arabs) that our happy fools at last metaphorically chucked out the window, and the four of us would drive into the weirdly carless streets of the metropolis singing the passably irrelevant stanzas of L’Internationale.

  “On the last of these excursions it was my turn. I should have known something was up. Two of my three passengers had been with me on earlier trips, a practice not forbidden — ‘prohibiting is prohibited!’ was a conspicuous slogan — but not encouraged either. On the outward leg I was suckered into relating my love affair with poetry in preposterous detail; no sooner had the drive back begun than my ordeal began as well. My passengers started needling me rather gently, and they were never less than affectionate, but soon they were pitching it in red hot; for a while I tried dutifully to stick it out, but I was gradually and meticulously divested of my addiction. I was made to see where it was leading me: a place where poetry would be a refuge, a line of defense to keep me safe from the active world — that world being then an obviously threatening one. I had no use for politically committed poetry — revealing injustice is better done with prose. I knew that one way poetry could be revolutionary was by subverting the conventions of language, by addling its normative expectations, by showing that words were almost never saying what they claimed to be saying. Could I have followed that path? Maybe. On that car ride my one-time friends showed me . . . they reminded me of a Situationist tag: most of us were like people in prison who kept going through days of confinement by remembering moments of being free and imagining future moments of freedom, and as a poet, I remembered past moments of ecstasy and imagined future ones, but like the prisoner I was, I was limited to surviving my present condition.

  “And I’d learned another way of using language. After a few days in May I knew how to talk to men and women, how to wake up their dormant possibilities — I could ‘manage’ them, not by psychological manipulation but by provoking them into moving on.

  “When most people talk about May 1968, they say its political and social effects were disastrous. It’s true that an uprising launched to defend the independence of the university in the end destroyed its authority. It’s true that many activists ended up in cushy jobs under Mitterand. It’s true that many others less fortunate drifted into poverty or bitterly gave up their progressive ideals. That was especially true of those from the middle class. They felt they had to create valid identities for themselves, they went to work in factories or started communal farms. Those people missed the point.

&n
bsp; “What was great in the best days of May was the exuberance not only of direct democracy but of winning. We brought about the longest general strike ever in an advanced economy. We had the government wetting its collective pants. Cabinet members were renting apartments in Brussels to escape imminent disaster. De Gaulle went off secretly to beg the army not to desert him. We were on a roll, not for long, just a few days. Not then or afterwards did I ever think about having a valid identity, it was never a concern for those of us who didn’t want to lose what we’d experienced. As a poet on the fringe I’d learned enough about being ‘downtrodden’ not to have to wreck myself running a machine!

  “For some of us there was a good way out: keep on changing life and lives by starting with our own. To someone like me who’d been addicted to Freud this was obvious. Just as it was obvious that you can’t change people by bashing them with good ideas. (Shaw said, ‘Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.’) Women understand this better than men. They see that politics begins in participation, in socialization, they’re easily committed to what one of them called ‘a critical renewal of everyday life.’ Me too — when I met Margot, who’d been through rough times as a belligerent feminist in Seattle, she took to me partly because I was no dogmatic leftist but a pragmatic, day-to-day saboteur.

  “Listen, that’s the best I can do.”

  Andreas: “I wish I’d been there.” It was an honest remark; but Andreas still couldn’t understand why his friend stopped writing poetry. Geoffrey’s enthusiasm for the innovative lab showed that acting directly on the way people function brought him a meatier satisfaction than the slow, indirect notation of poetic thought; but what of the slow, indirect side of him, where strange sights and sounds coalesce out of nothing, or nothing more than the caressing or crashing encounters of words aspiring to be pure as music, as mesmerizing as the sky on a cloudless night?