Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas

by Gass, William H.

  Naturally, it would not be sensible to reproduce the repetitions, backtrackings, or hems and haws of our conversations (which were normal, I think, in these respects), let alone observe the frequent silences which fell between us while I waited for him to complete a thought.

  He told me that first night only that he was building a theology based on the idea of vengeance, but, he said, he didn’t know me well enough yet to risk my laughter. I denied all possibility of mirth. Naturally you protest, he said, but if the cock crows to discomfit Paul, it will crow and discomfit anybody. Then he surprised me by asking, as we prepared to leave: do you know what Seneca says about retribution? I said I thought not. If you think not, you know not, Penner said, smiling so there’d be no reproof.

  Well, Seneca says: Scelera non ulciseris, nisi vincis. I had no idea, I reply, honestly enough. And you still haven’t, have you, Penner said, a bit peevishly. You can’t be a lawyer and not know Latin.

  After a bit, it became our habit to meet after class, wheel our bikes along the walk out of the college while talking about what had just taken place on Saint Bartholomew’s Eve or about “the fair field of folke” Penner was ploughing through, according to the schoolboy joke. At Cow’s Lick Café (so called because its owner had one), we would center ourselves as we had that first night, smack in the middle of the glare, where Luther would stir his coffee almost out of the mug and gradually admit me to his universe.

  God said “Lucifer” first. Penner pointed his dripping spoon at one of the blazing overhead lights and then at their reflection from cabinets and counters and floors, from fat mugs and white faces. So Lucifer thought he was … was first, was foremost, was of all created things … the boss. He was the angel of clarity, regardless of the cost, of purity and unconcealment, of everything naked and shining—the bare breast, the fishes’ scales—and of immediacy, too, he flew so fast—here to there in only a t. Indeed, he was the first sun of God (Luther’s grin slowed him down so I could catch up with his puns), and he revealed himself in the morning as a star.

  You might say it was a case of hubris in the highest which brought Lucifer down, but he had cause to be confused. All seemed clear to him, for he was clarity itself, he was light. Though he was not consubstantial with the Deity, he was still first in form and fact below that rank. He went anywhere and everywhere with amazing immediacy. And in each everywhere he was the cause of sight, of understanding, of life. I’d have forgiven him his pride. But God kicked him out of the sky for his presumption. Lucifer’s light became fire as he fell, as though he were a meteor entering the atmosphere. The pale spoon spun out of control into the cup.

  So he burned into the core of the earth, melting it like lead in a smelter, and now and then he shakes it, or it erupts, for he is still boiling mad after a zillion years. God dishonored His first creation, His son’s shine, and made him hide in the ground, where he lurked like a locust. When Lucifer flew into the caverns which became Hell, the universe went dark once more, chaos returned, reasoning was impossible. God had to do many things over again. This time He made a lot of little lights like Gabriel, who has to polish his armor to achieve a gleam, and who is dim as a grimy dime when he’s not wearing it.

  But if “Let there be Light” was a mistake, “Let there be lights to the number of the bugs” was a catastrophe.

  Except for the occasional smile to bemedal an especially smart remark, what Penner said was said with simple seriousness, even gravely, particularly when he drew consequences, like lengths of knotted hankies, from the sleeves of sacred texts.

  The soul is that inner gleam which enables us to see, to understand, to reason as I am doing now, to shine from one thought to another. It used to be called “the candle of the Lord.” You won’t believe it, but I have seen that light. Our little Lucifer. Yes, yours too, I think. That first night.

  Reason, you know, is the one real enemy of God. Reason is the Great Satan.

  Penner had a disorderly jam of teeth like flotsam on a beach, but he did not hide his mouth behind his hand, and his smile was broad and his grin wide. They gave a certain meaning to his words which his words by themselves never had, as if his sentences had seeped through several openings—as if they had been sieved. He was already losing the hair on the top of his head, and would soon look tonsured, which seemed suitable to me—to wear a halo of hair.

  Lucifer insisted on behaving like a Lord of Hosts, and many of the lesser, later angels followed his lead. He was, after all, the first word, the first deed, the seed of all sense. God really wanted Lucifer to deceive himself and accept a lesser station. Yet how could Light pretend to Darkness? Well, many angels went with him when he fell. There was a shower of them like a torrent of stars. The tormented flutter which came from the descending host created a great wind. Planets were blown from their orbits. Mountains lost their tops and through these holes the angels fell like thrown stones. The resulting winds ran like rivers through the universe, and are still the source of all streaming air—the breath of beating wings. Angels kept arriving in hell for eons after, plashing down into lakes of fire like tardy geese.

  This was revealed to you too? along with the sight of the soul’s inner light?

  And you said you’d be more reliable than Peter.

  I didn’t say I doubted or denied.

  You im……plied.

  During the ensuing weeks we discussed such oddly assorted subjects as the Wife of Bath and the machinations of Pope Sixtus IV, the idea of a pilgrimage, and the Pazzi conspiracy, The Rape of Lucrece and the siege of Siena. Shakespeare, Penner claimed, takes a revenge upon his readers which is so subtle and so artfully wrought they never feel its bite. “To take arms against a sea of troubles” was an idiot’s activity, and not likely to end anything, and a line like “To stamp the seal of time in aged things” was pompous, repetitive, and empty beyond belief, yet readers were led by his art to fancy the music such lines made, to repeat them for pleasure, and feel them profound, which demonstrated the readers’ own shallow standards instead, and how easily led down the rhetorical path their ears and minds and hearts were. It was a revenge by the great writer of the sweetest sort.

  After our coffees, we would push our bikes back to the rack, and go our separate ways from there, so our conversations tended to have a tripartite structure: first Chaucer or Pazzi, then Lucifer and treason, finally worries, hurts, and hopes. Penner was planning something in regard to his English instructor, who, he said, had resisted certain of Luther’s interpretations in a publicly scornful way. As the term’s end neared, I asked him what he’d done to redeem his honor. Oh, he exclaimed, it was easy. Always count on the weaknesses of your prey, for that is what makes them fair game. He had simply cited, in his final paper, a number of nonexistent sources to support his views, and the instructor, one Claude Hoch, had failed to challenge any of them. Surely, Luther said to me with his toothy smile and syrupy tone, surely you have read that splendid book on The Canterbury Tales by Nikki Quay D’Orsay? Sugar gave way to gravel. The ignoramus who is supposed to be teaching me Chaucer didn’t bat an eye at so openly outrageous a fabrication. Well, a snook for his snoot.

  Under ordinary conditions, Penner was a truth teller, but he was inclined to let rhetoric enlarge his assertions. I noticed this for the first time when we were discussing the Pazzi conspiracy, interesting mainly because the Pope was the principal plotter of that miserable enterprise. It failed and two subsequent attempts on Lorenzo the Magnificent, like fading rings around the tread of a water bug, were equally inept. Frescobaldi and his hired assassins were hanged from the windows of the Bargello, two to a window, Penner said, like drapes.

  I tried to envision it. Unfortunately, I was able; sadly, it was easy.

  During these days my mind was a jumble of examples, Luther supplying most, but I stirred in my share. I saw designs in the scud of clouds, underhandedness in every hello, a widespread scheme in the smallest exchange.

  Lucifer, Luther said, as he elaborated his Genesis for me
, may have been guilty, but he has, ever since, felt unjustly punished, and has nursed his grudge like a sucking calf. Good and Evil are like the family feuds between the Hatfields and McCoys, or the Montagues and the Capulets. Rejected, tossed aside, light began to burn, to consume instead of illuminate, and Lucifer became Satan, the Prince for those who would even the score—or go beyond the game the way the Duc de Guise did, who felt, like Hamlet’s Claudius, that “revenge should have no bounds.” That’s Seneca again. But by overstepping the bounds, by unevening things, as vendettas are inclined to do, the dreadful Duc earned and deserved the same fate as those he had massacred. Still, few retributions have been so thorough and carried out on such a scale as that of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, when, according to Lord Acton, whom we must believe, over two thousand Prots were piked or otherwise killed in Paris. Isn’t it Sully who says no person ever exacted as severe a vengeance as the Duc de Guise for his father’s murder?

  Light was so redundant in this place I thought of it as light’s last stand. The café echoed and my eyes heard. So you believe the Biblical account? I believe the Bible as semaphore—as encoded poetry—and what deep signals it sends—Penner replied. It’s written in wonderful “as it weres”—in brilliant als obs. The Big Book depicts—doesn’t it?—the moral world—I mean a world where every enterprise has its ethical price and every stone and bone and grommet its moral worth. In the same way the stage mocks our ordinary life. In front of painted flats, fakes in costume mimic our dreadful deeds, yet the moment the deed is done, the deed redounds; it replicates itself like a shout in a canyon; it bounces back upon the doer like a serve returned. Penner’s spoon ticks metronomically. Is that the way it happens here among us commoners? Remember Uzzah’s fate? a lowly soldier, unsanctified, touches the Ark of the Covenant while preventing that most sacred of symbols from falling off the rear of a rocking cart into the mud and dust of a rutted road. Uzzah, the salvator, is struck dead in thrice less twice. He broke a rule. Lightning, all fire and light, is ignorant and indifferent about what it fingers. The spoon points and spears.

  Do you know an Elizabethan play called A Warning for Fair Women? Luther, I know it not. Gooood. You’ve learned to light up your areas of ignorance. Actually, one can practice being proud of not knowing some things: how to bowl, for instance. Such an attitude is very disconcerting to those who had thought themselves superior on account of their lime Jell-O salad or the size of their stamp collection. Not having read the book or seen the movie everybody is talking about. Not being natty. Not owning a car though you know how to drive. Not being there.

  Anyway, in this characteristic drama a ghost comes whining and crying to be avenged. Vindicta, it asks. Like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, though less manfully. I’m impressed at the amount of vengeance that was hired out in former times. Not very honorable. But even the honorable thing has its mean and cheaty side. Remember the moment when Hamlet, prompted by his father to avenge his murder, comes upon the usurper, Claudius, kneeling and praying to his no-doubt forgetful and forgiving God. Now might I do it easily, Hamlet thinks. Now. Why not now? Because then we wouldn’t have a play, I brightly say … delay, delay. Quite, Penner responds with dry politeness. The Inquisition gave a different answer. I was supposed to be confounded by this shift of venue, and I was. Hamlet would seem cowardly, I offer. Quite so, yes. But … Luther is silent until I say what? You’ve forgotten. Hamlet has a splendid excuse. If he kills the king while the king is praying, the king’s soul might take flight to heaven, and Hamlet wants to send that soul straight to perdition. There … there is a secret revenge indeed. The Inquisition, with an opposite intention, used to torture its heretics until they confessed and were shriven. Then it auto da fé’d them (as if Hell were here) before they could relapse into sin again, saving their souls in the bargain. Clever, these Jesuits. Good fellows all: by this means they had their vindictive pleasure, scared their fellow believers into even finer conformity, redeemed a whole bunch of lapsed coupons, and got in good with their God by one turn of the rack and scratch of the match.

  I waited through a long silence. Then: scratch of the match, Luther repeated, as if deep in meditation. I wonder how many cases of arson … are … Easy to do. Hard to halt. Hellfire. Fun to watch. Difficult to detect.

  The maddened postal clerk … The low put-upon person … Snap … but now not like a twig … a grenade … Become a gun and go off … Remember Faulkner’s annoyance when he worked as a postal clerk: being at the beck and call of any asshole with three cents for a stamp. Spray the office … shoot from a campanile … tick tock … tick tock … Luther’s gaze would cloud, voice drift away.

  The whore who adores giving sailors syphilis, the guy with AIDS who adores making whores HIV poz. Luther’s spoon draws the plus, as if on the end of his nose. Typhoid Mary, on the other hand, was an innocent carrier. Like the transmitter of bad genes. But these cases teach us—see?—to see the difference between the specific victim of some revenge such as Ippolito’s brother was, with its focus on Don Giulio’s eyes, and the generic subject of a retribution like Alcibiades’ move against Athens, or an impersonal disdain for some Universal like Swift’s dislike of Man.

  These distinctions, which might have been subheaded and neatly numbered, I found drawn out in detail in Penner’s journals. There, revenges which were carried out against substitutes the way Satan tempted Eve to get back at God are carefully distinguished from hostage situations, scapegoats, and random misplacements. The measurements for appropriate requitals are taken with a tailor’s care. Symbolic revenges (burning the flag, for instance) are duly noted and evaluated. Sports and other games are rated for their revenge factor: hockey gets the highest marks. Throwing at a batter’s head is seen to be very complex, since the pitcher who is carrying out the revenge is rarely the one who was earlier hit, but is retaliating for the team, and the batter about to be hit is seldom the initial villain either.

  Luther made immense lists of massacres carried out to teach towns and/or countries a lesson, and these lists were accompanied by careful evaluations of the results, usually futile. Tribal feuds, racial hatreds, ritual retributions: they were all present and accounted for.

  There is the verbal vengeance of the quick-witted, who take people down from their pegs, like meat-lockered pigs, and cut them up, and the presumably acceptable revenge we call the practical joke: whoopee cushions, eh? Penner blows burbles through his lips. Drinking glasses guaranteed to spill something on your tie. Plastic turds. Rubber snakes. An industry.

  Then suddenly Luther returned to Hamlet, as, I discovered, he so often did. Why didn’t the king’s ghost go fright Claudius out of his widow’s bed? throw a baleful glow on the usurper’s gonads as they incesticated the sheets? say in the ear that had his own ear poisoned: remember me … Remember me? The handle of Luther’s utensil reamed his right ear. The gesture lacked class. It resembled the thumb in the … as I’ve already reported.

  I’m sure there is a reason, I say. Penner nods. You’re learning. Maybe a lawyer yet. A reason. At least a cause. Yes. Probably because the ghost can walk only at certain hours and in certain lacks of light, for when the cock crows to warn of the arrival of rosy-fingered dawn, the ghost feels summoned, and fades away as mist does. Or it is angered into absence because the crowing is a signal that Claudius’ cock is coming in the cunt of the queen, where the ghost once came, so that now it must go away in shame. The ghost wears armor like Gabriel, remember. I wonder whether he has ghostly private parts as well as ghostly shield and buckler. Penner’s look had withdrawn as if to another room. My spoon, my baton, has beat a bad tune and must be disciplined. He snapped the plastic handle from its plastic bowl and dropped them both in his nearly empty thick white china cup. So the interesting question is—beside the cock’s crowing to remind us of Peter’s denials and … yours of me—is whether Hamlet is to revenge his father’s murder because he is his father’s son, or whether he is to do it because he is the Prince and has royal obligations. In only the
latter sense is his requitaling Christian according to Saint Thomas.

  How so, I say, but I am in a quandary, or a daze, because I had never heard such language from Penner, nor would I hear it again. He was never a foulmouth despite his crooked, occasionally green teeth. Moreover, his violent gesture was not customary either, as far as I knew. I didn’t understand its rhetorical intent, though I knew there must be one.

  A reason. Or cause. A reason.

  Luther Penner was no stranger to coarseness, no more than his namesake, who used to curse the Devil in the Devil’s tongue. Yet he confined it to his journals, notes, and letters, which, as I’ve said, are frank to the point of painfulness, and to one public pronouncement—the notorious “Immodest Proposal”—a publication which led to the culminating catastrophe.

  Whoever takes vengeance on the wicked, when it is done on behalf and with the sanction of the state, does so with God’s blessing, because God, busy with other things, and with his hands full of wretches who deserve whipping, delegates his sacred powers to the princes; and the princes (who are more devoted to hunting) pass it on to judges and policemen. It is really the Mighty Mikado who is doing the revenging after all. Only by remote control. From beyond a cloud. Through anointed orders.

  Oops. Hamlet runs Polonius through through the curtain, the arras too, and through Polonius in consequence, but the punctures he makes in cloth, place, and Polonius he makes as a private person. It was, of course, an accident as well, and an oops of the most careless kind. On Laertes falls the burden of revenge, but it is an onus which is politically and religiously unsanctioned. Even if it is his dad. Penner poked at the plastic pieces and then rose to go. You didn’t drink your coffee, he noticed. I let it get cold. Good idea.

  Throughout these after-class meetings, which were about to end, I had always been painfully aware of our surroundings, not just of the bright polished plastic interior of The Cow’s Lick Café, but of our central seating—open, unprotected, obvious—and of Penner’s not loud but penetrating voice, and certainly of his expansive gesturing and Stukka-diving spoon. Our conversation was not something others would overhear with any understanding. On the contrary, I thought. Consequently I snuck peeks at our company while Penner’s eyes fished in the dark void which existed before the first word. There were a few regulars and one or two solitaries nearby who had obviously taken note of us, but that seemed to be it. I longed for wood paneling and low light and red vinyl banquettes, high-backed booths and a bit of privacy.