–Well, she continued, doesn’t his position seem like an ethical/political option worth highlighting?
Mara stiffened, then joined the others in their laughter.
The scarcity of resources in the neighborhood (two girls, their non-infinite number of orifices) often caused a sort of emergency amongst the males: they kept brushing up against each other. Even in a context of peaceful cooperation, the inclination to compete was unavoidable, albeit generally limited to simply verifying the other’s whereabouts. Accustomed as he was to an existence in which resentment was a form of lucidity, and thus of vigilance, Pabst was extremely conscious of these iterations. Tranquility, on the other hand, was Andy’s domain. If asked about said competitions, he would have laughed at the questioner and dismissed the hypothesis out of hand. His carefree attitude belied the irrevocable superiority that only extreme physical beauty can confer. Andy set his glass down on the floor and ensconced himself in his beanbag chair.
–I’m going to attempt to establish a relationship, he said, surely more modest than that last one, between the tools of sex and the implicit truths of the masses. In the 1960s, a man named Michael Condon undertook a research project whose consequences have been, to this day, insufficiently explored and poorly understood. His objective was to decode a film clip that was four seconds long. In it, a woman says to a man and a child, “I hope you enjoyed the chicken. I prefer it without bacon.” He divided the clip into second-long segments of forty-five frames, and set himself to watching them. It was a year and a half before he made his discovery: the woman moved her head at precisely the moment the man raised his hands. He began to reconstruct other micro-movements that were repeated time and again; in a given frame, a character’s shoulder might move just as someone else lifted an eyebrow or changed direction, and another series would begin. Condon surmised that all group behavior functioned on the basis of communicable, synchronous empathy. According to his theory, people’s actions are driven less by allegedly intellectual motivations than by systems of contagion that have no need of language whatsoever.
Pabst was about to say something (he’d just realized where these ideas were coming from) but Andy, alert to that danger, kept talking:
–What I’m saying is that it’s plausible that the irresistible instinct to act en masse, to replicate the irresistible circuit of empathy, constitutes a sort of private language for our species, one that is older than any spoken language, its source residing deep below the conscious mind. The phenomena of synchrony and contagion may yield only a single visible detail in a vast and complex field of study. Perhaps the implicit languages that modulate our conduct depend on some quality that we’ve been dragging along with us since Pleistocene times. Perhaps those languages . . . perhaps they’re associated with the superimposition of multiple supposedly meaningful messages at a particular time and place!
Pabst scratched his chin, careful not to let his fingertips brush against a pimple that was crowned with a minuscule carbuncle of pus. If he added examples, complementing Andy’s thoughts with a series of Pabstian über-cool opinions—that is, if he assented to the proposed format of literary dialogue—the situation could well develop into something resembling masculine bonheur or camaraderie. Pabst wavered; it was an awfully complex scenario. He had to act carefully, as he didn’t want his narcissistic interest in unfurling his own opinions to lead to some fraternal handshake as regarded the mysteries of the human species—not by any means. His hand settled alongside his balls as he began.
–There’s an extremely common type of amoeba (Dictyostelium discoideum) that, whenever the colony is spread out in the grass or across the trunk of a fallen tree, which is where it’s most often found, looks very much like dog vomit. These amoebas have a simple unicellular structure, and spend most of their time moving around individually, completely independent of one another. But under the proper circumstances, millions of them will unite and coordinate their actions, creating what amounts to a single organism that slides across people’s yards, eating rotten leaves as it goes. The changes that affect the colony can be tiny ones. If the temperature drops two degrees, the great amoeba becomes disorganized, disintegrates back into the myriad unicellular organisms it was before; if the temperature then rises a little, the process of dissolution reverses itself: each one becomes part of a single “them” whose behavior indicates that they are all blindly obeying the unified decision-making I of the Prime Amoeba. Now, what exactly is organizing this myriad of tiny dots that is suddenly acting as if it were a single body, and beyond that, how do they know which direction to go? (I forgot to mention that in August of 2000, Toshiyuki Nakagaki managed to train one of these amoebic organisms to find the shortest route through a maze.) The earliest hypotheses simply correlated to the researchers’ own political notions: they posited that there was a group of elite amoebas who gave orders to the rest, a sort of vanguard that sent back instructions so that the others might follow. This “vanguard hypothesis” was extremely difficult to prove, and for twenty years scientists believed that their inability to find any elite amoebas showed only that they, the scientists, lacked sufficient data, or that their experiments were poorly designed; the commandos had to be somewhere, and if they weren’t, well, that only meant that the means of searching for them was flawed. Later, Keller and Segal proved that the transformation from “one” to “us,” from individuality to coordinated action, is based on a purely chemical process. When the local amount of cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) was altered, the amoebas were carried along on pheromones generated by their comrades—the signal created a positive feedback loop, with each amoeba increasing its own production of cAMP, inciting all the others to do the same. This loop actually combines two types of behavioral rules: syntactic and chemical. The combination of the two results in the phenomenon known as imitation. Same thing with Dante in The Divine Comedy. Take the case of Paolo and Francesca. One day, the two of them innocently start reading the story of Lancelot. When they come to the part where the knight falls in love with Queen Guinevere, both of them blush; when they read that the two characters kiss, Paolo and Francesca have their first kiss as well. They fall deeper and deeper in love as they read deeper and deeper into the book. Their fascination with the written word, with imagining the text’s binary game of “her and him” coming to life through their own bodies, convinces them that they are a chapter in the general history of absolute passion. (Not for nothing does Spanish allow certain verbs to use the same conjugation in both first and third person: decisive detail!) Neither Paolo nor Francesca realizes that they are erasing the mediator—Dante’s book—and the amoebas likewise pass information along without ever realizing that they are obeying a law of general association. The moral of the story appears to be this: the most interesting part of the narrative curve is that which has the greatest number of possibilities for emitting and absorbing warmth; Nature and Dante agree that in heat, contagion is perfectly non-trivial.
Pabst let himself fall sweetly, softly back; he closed his eyes and popped the zit on his chin. He had subtly compared the two theories, leaving Andy with the weaker one; he had connected two authors with absolutely nothing in common; he hadn’t displayed any symptoms of Due Deference Syndrome, or shown any desire to put an end to the discussion once and for all. As for the honeyed glob of pus on his fingertip, at some point he’d find something to wipe it on—at some point Andy would take his shirt off once again, the women’s eyes would lift, feverish; no one would notice anything.
Andy had first heard about the holocaust of the 1970s at the age of five, in Pinamar. Apparently he was pulling at his mother’s skirt because he wanted an ice cream. Susana, his mom, leaned down to him—jangling Balinese earrings, Farrah Fawcett hair. She hooked her fingers through his belt loops and looked lovingly into his eyes. “Do you see that sign up there? All right, now, your grandfather already taught you to read. What does the sign say?” Andy maintains that this was the first time he was ever aware of a
ctually shrugging his shoulders. Looking through the pines he could see a Bavarian-style cottage, where there was a huge cone topped with a pink ball, the image completed by a slender maternal finger, nail gleaming with polish: Massera Ice Cream. “Well, Massera is an evil man who threw a bunch of people out of an airplane, okay? Why don’t we buy an alfajor instead? Look, there’s a Havanna right over there.” Susana ruffled his bowl-cut hair, and reassumed her adult posture. From then on, the boy looked suspiciously at every airplane, but Massera’s dulce de leche remained his favorite flavor until Volta finally opened its doors.
At Mara’s high school, on the other hand, the students were encouraged to contemplate the sort of disturbing issues that would lead them to compose essays about the Disappeared and poems about the dictatorship during their Speech and Drama class. After crying a little and drinking her first few cups of strong coffee, Mara had written a piece called “Song of the Grandmother Who Speaks from the Depths of the Wolf ”:
DAUGHTER: There is an auburn-tinted dream in which I can’t see anything, my head is covered with a hood, and I hear the voice of someone who hates me and yet wishes to paw at me.
GRANDMOTHER: These things that seem made for stabbing, they are men, my little girl. They stab themselves into you. They fear nothing. Your voice nestles inside my ear, without you ever making a sound. Their tongues stab deeply into you as well. I too am wearing a hood, like Little Red Riding Hood. The teardrops of sweat fall from the walls that enclose you, drip onto the back of my neck. My neck bends down, my body a circle, a circle closed in vain.
DAUGHTER: Knock, knock. Who’s there? The stick wants to know if there’s anyone inside my body. There’s nothing inside his because he’s solid wood. Carved from a single piece of painstaking certainty, a macho comic opera: in short, a man. In the evil glow of his presence, I sense that he won’t want the flavorless parts of me. I whisper: that he won’t want. His breath hangs lasciviously around my neck. I have been pressing my thighs so tightly together that they seem to have become one. The dust, motes of imprisoned skin, a cascade of sparkling golden flecks floating down to the pool of water on the floor.
THE END
The heat and the filth—push rivers across, inside my skin—nothing separates blood from other blood. I am nothing but a sense of hearing, porous, awaiting the sharp ring of ironclad footsteps—those who have come to choose me. The blue smoke betrays my presence like a light shining down on the dead. I step forward into his outstretched arms and cannot breath. In this basement, lying beneath this guy, it’s impossible to breath. It’s too dark for anyone to see me shaking my head, but it can be felt. I’m so afraid he’ll kill me that I can’t even scream.
* * *
It was published in the school paper (her classmates suggested changing the title to “Hit Me and Call Me Esma”) and when Mara brought a copy home, her mother hugged her and wept wildly out of sheer pride. She sat down at the kitchen table of their apartment in Palermo Sensible, snug up against Villa Freud, and offered her daughter another cup of coffee. Mara accepted tearfully; an intense chat was clearly in the offing. Her mother opened wide her enormous green eyes and caressed Mara’s smooth, elegant forehead. Mara, she said, when your father and I first met, he had a girlfriend and I had a boyfriend. I was a Trotskyite and he was a Montonero. My best friend and I were always arguing with the Montos. I don’t know why, but they had all the cutest guys—big mustaches and long hair, all committed intellectuals. On the night our department held its elections at the university, we went out to stir up some trouble in the streets. We were already pretty drunk, and Liliana had hooked up with one of the FAR guys. Well, long story short, what a bunch of assholes the PST guys turned out to be. (Remember when I told you, Uncle Robert was with them for a while but then he left?) The thing is, I really liked the one Liliana was with, but there was a blackout, and I ended up fucking the guy’s friend, Martín. They killed Martín two days later, and Juan Carlos (the cute one) got his teeth drilled for the cyanide pill the day after that. He came to the house to see me (I was living with Liliana back then but it was obvious that he’d come to see me instead, because when I went to the corner window he gave me a little signal, and I snuck down and met him a block away. It was a bit cold out and we did it up against a wall, it doesn’t bother you that I tell you all this stuff, right?) and he said that he was headed for Formosa, that a big operation was about to get underway. I told him, I said Juan Carlos, I like you a lot, but I’m a Trotskyite, as Trotskyite as you can get. He told me to go wake up Liliana. The two of them were killed in the same battle, and every time the date comes around I think of you, Mara, and I’m so happy that I held on to my ideals that day, to my way of seeing the Revolution. I think of you and your brother, and what could have happened if there’d been another blackout, if I hadn’t had the presence of mind to say, okay, yes, he’s very cute, he’s a Monto, whatever; but this is about ideology, not about who’s the best fuck.
Cris, Mara’s mother, is still very pretty, and has decided not to remarry. She likes to say she prefers to have boyfriends who aren’t so much “live-in” as “live-out,” in the mistaken belief that “live-in boyfriend” is still something you say. Mara lost her virginity at the age of sixteen, a few months after writing the wolf poem, with one of her mother’s friends. Crying made her more sensitive, and after each session of historical guilt and visions of the boots of brutes crushing the throats of beautiful young girls, it gave her an unnameable pleasure to prostrate herself, eyes closed, mute, imagining those huge hands at her waist, slowly removing what Henry Miller would have referred to as her “panty briefs.” After that she dated a couple of punk rockers. And throughout that time, lying beneath those men, Mara occasionally lamented having been born at the wrong moment, having missed out on that dazzling whirlwind of courage and sensuality, because according to her fantasies—swaddled in quiet murmurs, panting and drool, along with earliest hypotheses as to what an orgasm might be—there couldn’t be anything in this world more beautiful than working for justice and fucking in the name of the Fatherland.
Which is exactly what I’d been doing, as I’m about to explain.
9
I have so often feared for my life, and for the lives of those around me. Philosophy is Satan’s playground. I can’t explain why certain texts cause the golden down on my childlike arms to rise. The slightest mention of impending nightfall feels like the overture to a massacre. At times, when I am lost in those worlds, it seems to me that I can hear the clamor of criminal hordes as they advance, their mouths thirsty for the blood of the people. I can see them, stalking me through the interstices between paragraphs. Warrior games in the swamplands.
That night, the rain slashed against the window of my pied-à-terre, and the water in Yorick’s fishbowl trembled as if in a hurricane. Montaigne Michelle figured out how to knock the fishbowl to the floor; Yorick, lord of fake seaweed, survived. The telephone rang; whoever it was hung up. The most sinister intuitions stalked me. Nature has an absolutely gothic effect on me. Frequently the sound of a twig snapping takes on terrifying overtones, and what meteorologists refer to as winds are in fact eidos for which there is no human name. Now the doorknob trembled as if something vicious were trying to force its way in. I clung to my thick black trilingual edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Dressed in double-thick winter pajamas, I put on my writing cap (a habit I’ve had since I first read Little Women—remember Jo?) and locked my only window. The storm sizzled outside, my thoughts now ominously italicized. Montaigne Michelle pricked up her ears and looked at me, worried. I raised my index finger to my lips, ordering silence.
It is well known that the experience of terror late at night is essential to a thorough understanding of political philosophy. According to John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Thomas Hobbes would sing at the top of his lungs each night in bed, because, “he did believe it did his lungs good and conduced much to prolong his life.” This Galileo of political scien
ce lived in fear that one night someone would cut his throat; he sang to confirm that his throat was intact and to establish the deafening nature of the World. It would not be unreasonable to venture that Hobbes’s intimate knowledge of fear did wonders for his mature work; his writing is permeated with an extraordinary glut of visual detail through which a sense of terror becomes systemic. Rousseau, too, suffered episodes of both classical and baroque paranoia. (As Augustus said hoarsely during one particularly emotional lecture throughout which he stared into my eyes: The Is demand for mental unity can turn suddenly into the sensation of being surrounded by enemies.) How to protect man from himself?
A cockroach scuttled along the edge of the room. (When little Montaigne first arrived, Yorick and I were sharing our lair with an uncontrollable population. Yorick’s fishbowl home kept him out of danger, but on several occasions he’d had the opportunity to observe that cockroaches, even half-dead ones, have excellent swimming technique.) I gave the order for Montaigne Michelle to set her ambush . . . Now! She purred toothily. The individual in question (a Blatella germanica) came forward a meter or so; Montaigne put it down with a single swipe of her paw. Flat on its back, its abdomen contracted in pain, the cockroach bent its antennae toward us. I believe that it sensed the formidable presence of its motionless adversary—perhaps, too, that of the impromptu Thucydides who sat nearby taking notes. Finally it managed to get back on its feet. And here is where this domestic tableau takes on transcendental dimensions: it was at this moment that, overawed by such brutality, irresistibly attracted to a power far superior to her own, the scene’s victim advanced voluntarily toward the Predator, and bowed down to her, in a sign of Reverence.
I stayed there beside the fish bowl, wholly absorbed. How to explain the fascinating virtue of she who perpetrates her own devouring? Is there some voluptuous connection between Reverence, the Sovereign, and Death? I immediately began chewing on my pencil, my interior voice obsessively mimicking the insect’s thoughtways, the dictamen rationis of that sesquipedalian voluptuary:
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