Savage Theories

by Pola Oloixarac

  5.1

  Anyone who reads these pages before meeting me in person1 should picture a woman in her twenties with a jet-black mane, wearing a beige overcoat. Emotion has given a rosy tint to her cheeks. She pushes her hair back from her face, and tiptoes through a glass door leading to a vestibule whose marble floors are lined with red carpet. Like a débutante from imperial Russia, the young woman blinks delicately at the rabble of which the world before her is composed—a world her glaucous feet do not yet dare enter. She has come to another doorway, this one thick with people pushing their way in; knocked off balance by the moderately brutal elbows of those alongside her, she stumbles into the ballroom.

  The event in question is an embassy reception in honor of a young writer from the Yucatan who has come to visit Buenos Aires; the promise of free drinks in a decorous environment attracted the cream of the local intelligentsia. Mariachis musicalized the environment. Small gatherings of ladies and gentlemen stood in animated conversation around certain luminaries; there were groups of bohemians, philobohemians, academics, and bald guys with canine silhouettes. A somber army of waiters handed out glasses of champagne; the atmosphere was relaxed, the public well-disposed toward the mariachis in their sparkling vests, who now struck up the bolero “Sabor a mí.”

  Our young débutante slides furtively along, wading through the undulating light that streams in through the art nouveau windows, looking discretely in all directions. She stops for a moment, thinking of nothing in particular; when the mariachi trio reaches the lines, “No pretendo ser tu dueña / no soy nada, yo no tengo vanidad,” she recovers her motor/cranial skills. There is no sign of Augustus anywhere.

  She gulps down the champagne she is offered and bolts a bacon canape, her lips atremble. The song mutates surreptitiously into “Piel canela” (also known as “Me importas tú”). One of Augustus’s teaching assistants, a stable boy from his nepotistical duchy, now crosses the room bouncing off of other guests. It’s chubby little E.G., and he’s coming toward her. Horrified, the young woman tries to blend in with those around her. The waves of humanity continue to knock E.G. around; in the end they toss him up beneath the windows, and she slips out along the shore break, hopefully in the direction of the restrooms.

  Drawn by her unescapable gravitational force, men gaze at her, speak to her, attempt to stop her from leaving. But she can’t afford to be distracted by the idle chat of those who aren’t part of her plan. She finds a place where she will be safe from the jackals; sadly, it is not long before a waiter stoops politely to ask what she’s doing under the table, and whether she’s feeling all right. Though still separated from her prey by dozens of meters and guests, she can already smell him. He cannot hide from her. She stands and accepts the champagne the waiter offers. Her acid lips gleam.

  And suddenly the noun García Roxler is made flesh, here he is, blue gabardine, gray trousers, I can see him clearly. Towering, magnetic, graying hair, inexpressive smile—perhaps he feels a slight disdain for the quidam before him, who used to be the Municipal Secretary of Culture. Oh, I could certainly have drifted between the ex-Secretary and his incredulous captive audience like a mermaid carved on the prow of a ship, but that was not my plan! I wasted no time in extending my hand exquisitely.

  –Dr. García Roxler, good evening. I have an impossible project to offer you.

  It wasn’t the first time that the vigor of my candor left someone perplexed. He recoiled a bit, a modest avis, and in the act of distancing himself he displayed (Majestitas Domine!) the slightly absentminded, obscurely romantic aplomb—the reticent, innately seductive aura—of a genuine South American academic. The ex-Secretary inclined his bald head toward me, affecting an air of Parisian refinement; I took my lip between my teeth, voracious.

  Habitually a man of few words, Augustus thought it sufficient to respond (to me) as follows:

  AUGUSTUS: I trust your instincts. How about if you don’t offer me the project, and I don’t accept.

  ME: Don’t think that wouldn’t be a mistake on your part. Of course, the conditions are such that you feel obliged to turn me down. But those conditions aren’t, shall we say, entirely objective.

  AUGUSTUS (a bit impatient): To what do you refer?

  I explained with all due deference that certain of his essays suffered from a series of errors, rather serious errors let us say, serious and contagious enough to infect his other texts, which otherwise might be considered rather powerful, or at least of certain interest. Moreover, I happened to find myself in a position to correct those errors, and I very much preferred to say so here at this party rather than destroy him publicly at some future congress. The ex-Secretary seemed very amused, and asked for my name. Augustus held him back with a gesture (perhaps one born of jealousy) and, prey to unwarranted certainty or inborn spite, he leaned toward me ever so slowly, parsimoniously, and said:

  –I doubt, Miss, that your characterization of my work, however energetic it might be, would interest me much.

  The moment of silence grew thick: at once open and furtive. Often, in his classes, I’ve felt him monitoring me closely. I was aways surprised by the firmness of the pact of submission that he maintained vis-a-vis one particular region of my anatomy. Simply put, his position never softened. I let my eyelids fall half closed in reverence, sensing that these dark arts only work when one is still. A prodigious yearning rose up through my knees, surged across my amatory triangle. I can see it, can see it all: Augustus rising to write something on the chalkboard; and Augustus suddenly stopping, struck by the bolt of some fabulous, ungodly idea, eraser in hand. Augustus tolerating interruptions, slowly clenching his fist of fury. Augustus caught up in a spirited circumlocution, and no one is listening; he paces up and back, stops skeptically, stares at the ceiling panels. I see him changing his mind (returning to the fork, the two paths leading to different worlds, choosing the right one this time) and carefully snapping a stick of chalk in half. His face turns back and forth between the empty chalkboard and the empty faces of the students in the first few rows; then he slumps down into his chair, draws a few yellow candies from the inside pocket of his blazer, and continues his lecture, speaking as if completely alone, the rest of us participants in some strange, repetitive act of homage, the eminence García Roxler made manifest, and now he stands in the center of the classroom, dedicates his somber hendecasyllables to me—sublime messages that no one but I could decipher.

  I answered slowly, as if drawing near to a little woodland creature, letting my words fall like candies amongst all the little woodland creatures. He said nothing in return, eschewing his linguistic dexterity, overconfident in the power of his facial rhetoric. (Actually, he did say a thing or two, but, noblesse oblige, I prefer to swathe that fetid outburst of saliva and post-structuralism in an equally brusque silence.) I stood unscathed, my empty champagne glass trembling in my hand. Ideas pertain to a fortress built of syntactic densities; they can only communicate their own purity through a deliberately precise execution of the facts. I was able to read the back side of his plot’s tapestry, and could have told him what I knew, could have retreated with the hygienically clean conscience of one who, before striking the death-blow, explains to the fallen that after the dagger will come the fire, the siege, the strategic concealment of the pyres. Could he see, with those atrophied optical nerves of his, how the terrible shadow of this ever-so-young Athena, si sage et si combative, was rising up to blot out the ancient stars? I insisted once more that he take into account my corrections to the Theory of Egoic Transmissions—and here I slowed my speech—at this, the dawn of its radicalization. The echoes of my decisive coda had only begun to fade gracefully into the tulle of silence when the left corner of Augustus’s mouth started to twitch; just then, plump E.G. materialized beside his fair lord, held out a glass, blanketed me with jealous looks.

  The most prudent of my readers will say that this was the moment to disappear, quietly humming So long, farew
ell . . . And while I was able to detect this signal emanating from the labyrinth of fabrics, foul air, disjointed sentences, and sweat known as the world, I did not budge. No, sirree! To the contrary: this fatidic male trio had unwittingly solved the combination, setting loose a rebellious army within me. I was taken by a sudden voluptuous fit of desire to recite a few verses in the manner of Von Clausewitz:

  But the annihilation of the other (the adversary)

  cannot consist merely of a simple logical negation;

  to the contrary,

  it must be a dialectical negation engendered by the conflict itself.

  To the extent that the conflict is developed—that is,

  to the extent that its potentiality is developed—

  it manifests not as a strength in itself

  but as a product

  of a reality created

  by antagonists who are

  likewise

  real.

  I stayed silent, however, choking back my desire. Something similar, perhaps, to what cats feel as hair balls advance and retreat along their laryngeal passage. (And do I play with the hair ball, or does the Hair Ball play with me? So might wonder Montaigne, my kitten. Soon I’ll tell you more about Yorick, my fish.) This, this is the silent dilemma of Time and Space teetering at the edge of existence; in my personal Synesthesia-Foundational-Synesthesia dictionary, pure apnea, sliding under pressure through my deepest passages. It is as if the surface were getting farther and farther away, becoming vague and porous, much like the three men who now appear ever more distant, ever darker, submerging themselves in other wells of meaning, distancing themselves along other rocky peninsulas.

  I know that he pivoted slightly, taking care not to let the others see—his personal way of saying, “See you later.” But I don’t want to get ahead of myself, don’t want to, as the Americans say, “push the envelope” in examining any given intuition, any cold explosion of empathy long held in check, in assessing the relative severity of a sneer, or of the distant, collegial glow that grave souls emit in the presence of an equal. The excuses of your pride shall not blind me.

  I want you to see, Augustus, to make note of the crystalline piety with which I shall have to act for now. I know that in principle you may have convinced yourself that disentangling the key to your theory is a task that is yours and yours alone. (For the moment I allow myself to speak to you as an equal, but in a moment I will cease doing so, carried along by the local intonation—as sober, as somber and neutral, as flat as our Río de la Plata.) I understand that it is often difficult to transfer the power of a determination—one that is seemingly autonomous—to the allure (and probably the fear) of seeing it hunted down, dangling from bloody fangs amidst a chorus of voices, a sight I will soon show to you as I advance upon your comrades-in-arms, your Is that are almost you, those yous that are almost me, chosen by your true you within you.

  Because your theory is incomplete without me.

  * * *

  1 Other than Augustus, who knows perfectly well who I am.

  6

  Pabst and Kamtchowsky agreed that in terms of aesthetic obsessions, the return of pure sensibility ran parallel to heresy. The truly sad things of this world had become so exacerbated that the tale of the Ugly Duckling was now a minimalist iteration, a myth of origin that gave structure to the tragedy lived by the many millions who had eyes to see and thus knowingly stood observed and demoted (by themselves and the rest of the world) on the basis of homeliness. Modern songbooks were full of delicate hymns to the certainty of intrinsic patheticness, to self-consciousness regained as mirrors. This is precisely the story of Pablo’s childhood. The disquieting mirrors in his desperate soul weren’t tucked away at the end of some psychic hallway—they covered the walls of the very living room. And the evidence they provided made intercourse—the possibility of intercourse—unthinkable. The Spanish word for mirror, espejo, shares a root with the word species; the mirror shows each species for what it is, and lays bare the shoddy reasoning that has led each to think itself unique. Pablo recently wrote a blog post confessing all this, and a number of other things as well. He promised that he would soon post a few homemade snuff films starring individuals (“see charts below”) who had systematically denied him attention and affection, then headed off to bed.

  Elton John’s “Sacrifice” was ranked first on Pabst’s list of best possible background songs for the humiliation of the chronically adolescent individual. His distrust of anyone younger than himself was positively canonical. Little Kamtchowsky quickly became suspicious of them as well—she hewed instinctively to the latest sociological trends. The two often shared the vertiginous impression that all conversation was but a prelude to some new prejudice—and to the extent that one was conversing with the right people, this prejudice would be ever riskier, ever more outrageous, ever more decadent.

  Kamtchowsky often picked her nose in public, and the habit had given her a special ability to sense furtive glances in her direction. This evening, she and Pablo were headed to a goth party in Suipacha y Viamonte, where they hoped to test a number of their pet theories. She was wearing a black flared skirt, socks with polka dots, and Mary Janes. He was wearing Puan-gray trousers, three T-shirts one on top of another, and had his ever-present, notebook-stuffed rucksack hanging from his shoulder. In sum, then: two researchers doing fieldwork in the city.

  Pabst had often observed that the sexual conduct of standard adolescents gave evidence of a strikingly peculiar numerical discontinuity. In their first relationship they had intercourse once or twice with a given partner; their second relationship was much the same; but from there they jumped straight to six-person orgies. What sort of exponential function did this imply? Could one derive from such behavior a logarithmic calculus of generational disdain for the nobler sentiments? His own sexual history had been devoid of courtly love the same way weapons of mass destruction have been cut short of deploying their powers in full; both had only been able to exist as threats. And yet, Pabst never fully abandoned the project of emotional reciprocity, the fest of blowing and catching kisses on air. With astonishing speed, the current sociological hypothesis had dissociated itself from that which only comes after years of heartbreak, and its similarity to Rousseau (his work as portrait) encourages one to demonstrate that sexual conduct pertains specifically to the precise facet of the individual that allies itself only with the will of the majority. Pabst had addressed the topic on his blog as follows:

  “In effect, the concrete development of the common self on one hand and of the general will on the other both presupposes and implies—as a logically necessary postulate rather than as a historically real act—the existence of the social contract.”

  Their hypothesis duly established, they were still a good ways from the entrance, the crowds had already grown thick, and it seemed fairly unlikely that the bouncer would let them in. Every five minutes Pabst had to push his eyeglasses back up the bridge of his nose; the oily film covering his skin had them perpetually sliding down. He was nervous, and thought it unreasonable that someone as good at taking tests as he was should have to put up with being grilled by the ignorant galliform at the door. To console himself, he chewed through a series of syllogistic mantras:

  –So, the human brain is designed to establish relationships only within small groups, and seeks constantly to reproduce the feeling of being “just amongst us.” All attempts at socialization are intended to recreate within us a series of previously successful patterns of empathy, because . . . Aha! Because the only real human instinct is to flee into the forest depths. If this weren’t the case, why would the State expend so much effort teaching us to love that which is social, and why such frantic insistence on the amorous-gregarious nature of the glorious Fatherland? Social training is an operating system composed of customs designed to minimize the panic one feels at finding oneself completely surrounded. Social aristocracies a
re brought into existence as a form of technology that enables the elite to tolerate the proximity of others, as another way to address the need for human contact felt by the I while simultaneously protecting it from the unwashed hordes via membership cards and club protocols. The presence of the bouncer ensures that the favored group will stay small. The charm exuded by the elite is the Ersatz of an evolutionary defect related to our genetic inability to be alone, which is to say, to rid ourselves of our fear of the forest—and to do so with sufficient speed.

  The later it got, the more intense grew the couple’s desire not to be turned away at the door. But they knew how imprudent it would be to push forward with so little evidence of worthiness at their disposal; average adolescents would only reveal the hidden diamond of their conduct to those who dare to share the same dream of sweaty skin, black light, and crystal meth. Kamtchowsky heard Pabst sigh, noticed his trembling hands, and decided to buck him up.

  –The whole concept of the urban tribe is both fallacious and stupid, she said. All of these people want exactly the same thing: a simple straightforward fuck. Or else a lucid fuck, one they won’t feel the need to try to forget tomorrow morning. And it’s easier to fuck someone who dresses the same way you do, albeit not so much because of some alleged empathy based on textile preferences—the fact is, you’d fuck anyone willing to fuck you. The key, then, is to maintain a strict policy of defrauding your own conscience, which has no way of knowing that you’d be perfectly happy fucking anyone at all. Deciding with whom to associate on the basis of fabric color and texture allows your conscience to verify empirically that in fact you are not fucking absolutely everyone, but only a select few. That is, it’s not so much that the modern self has broken down and now finds itself at the mercy of much stronger unconscious forces, but that it perpetually designs ever more sophisticated strategies for maintaining control. And in this case, the chosen means of control requires that one mimic a tactical strategy of unknowing.