by Robert Stone
At the edge of the university complex, there was a monument to the Reform that had made Compostela a free country. Once past it, they drove among the floodlit fountains and concrete lawns until they had pulled up before the House of the Study of Mankind.
“So here,” Holliwell offered, as he paid and overtipped the driver, “it’s not like Tecan.”
The driver looked shocked.
“No no no,” he said with passion. “It’s not free there. And it’s very bad for the poor.”
The foyer of the House of the Study of Mankind had murals on its walls by a celebrated Compostelan painter, an imitator of Orozco and a habitué of the Brasserie Lipp. The murals contrasted awkwardly with the neo-Florentine design of the building but they did portray mankind in a variety of transcendent postures. The foyer, as Holliwell entered it, was crowded with students who had gathered in conspiratorial groups along the wall. They spoke watchfully and eyed Holliwell as he passed. Many of them appeared to be youth without morals and there were some with the pistolero style. There was a great deal of laughing among them, but it was not pleasant to hear. It echoed in the dead space of the windowed Italianate dome high overhead.
There were two exhibit halls at either end of the foyer, both of them closed off behind gates of metal grill. In one was a diorama portraying the history of the Republic with an emphasis on the treachery of her neighbors and her sufferings at the hands of the church. The Catholic university, in another suburb, had one very like it which recounted the Neronian martyrdom to which the church had been periodically subjected by her ungrateful Compostelan children. The hall on the opposite side of the foyer was a museum, a dull affair of feathered rattles in glass cases. Both halls had been secure behind their grill gates for nearly ten years.
Beyond the entrance hall was a patio with native plants and a Spanish fountain; Holliwell displayed his invitation to a university guard in order to pass. It was a pleasant place, the patio, and Holliwell entered it gratefully, seating himself along the fountain’s edge to listen to the broken rhythm of the water and student voices in the hall outside. He had not sat for longer than a moment when he saw a gray-haired man come down one of the stone stairways from the upper story to approach him. The man was extending his hand but there was a faint posture of disapproval in his manner. The fountains, Holliwell supposed, were not to be sat beside.
“Professor Holliwell?” the gray-haired man inquired.
Holliwell stood up. His stance was unsteady.
“Claudio Nicolay,” the man said, taking Holliwell’s hand. “Associate rector for the discipline of sociology. Welcome again to Compostela.”
Nicolay had the face of the Field Marshal von Paulus, colored in brown.
“I’m very happy to be here,” Holliwell told him. “I thank you for inviting me.”
“Ah yes,” Nicolay said, in what Holliwell thought to be a strangely ambiguous manner. “Will you follow me, please?”
They climbed the stone stairs which Nicolay had descended and walked along a mezzanine lined with open classrooms that exuded a scent of old wood and mold repellent. But the room to which Nicolay finally led him was constructed of bright stainless synthetics and lit with fluorescent ceiling fixtures. There was a podium up front; thirty or so people sat on straight-backed wooden chairs facing it. The audience stirred and turned toward Holliwell as Nicolay conducted him halfway down a side aisle and then leaned against the wall to face him.
“We have expected,” Nicolay said, “that you would speak in English. This will be quite O.K. Our group tonight is for the most part English-speaking.”
“Well,” Holliwell said, “I prepared it in Spanish. I thought …”
Nicolay interrupted him.
“You may give your address as you like. My opinion is that English would be preferred.”
It was all, Holliwell had come to realize, extremely brusque. Even if Nicolay had decided that he was drunk and was resentful, even if he were trying to be informal and Stateside in manner—the whole business smacked of rudeness. People were not casually rude in Compostela.
Holliwell shrugged. “As you like, Doctor.”
“So you will speak and then maybe there will be questions. O.K.?”
“O.K.”
“It was thought afterwards to have cocktails on the terrace. We hope you can stay.”
“Thank you again,” Holliwell said.
“As for your payment—it’s been arranged.”
“That’s fine,” Holliwell said. He was determined not to be made uncomfortable.
“Whenever you’re ready then, I’ll introduce you.”
“Go right ahead,” he told Nicolay.
The professor doctor conducted him to the dais and he looked over the house. More than half of his audience were women. At least a third appeared to be North American. Their faces were indistinct under the fluorescent lights. Holliwell owned a pair of reading glasses which he used on occasions when innovative lighting or his own intemperance baffled vision; he had left them in his hotel room, beside the scotch.
Nicolay’s introduction was as suitable for Holliwell as for anyone else and when it was concluded there was polite applause.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Holliwell declaimed, “esteemed colleagues.” Who in hell, he wondered, are these people? He looked helplessly down at his laborious espanished address and paused.
“I see before me,” he told them, after an awkward moment had passed, “I see before me, imperfectly, the notes which it had been my purpose to deliver in the language of this country. I must tell you that to put it back in English as I speak seems a very daunting business. I think it is an impossible business.”
He looked at Nicolay, who was sitting in the last row and was recognizable to Holliwell only by his dark complexion and iron-gray hair. As he looked, his Compostelan colleague appeared to undergo parthenogenesis; two Dr. Nicolays looked up at him, their grave expressions only to be imagined. In the blurred faces of the audience, he presumed to read geniality and patience.
“Allow me to share, as we say in my country, this experience. The sharing of this experience will constitute an inter-American, intercultural act. In performing together an intercultural act, ladies and gentlemen and esteemed colleagues, we may capture the workings of culture in vivo. On the hoof.”
There was a little uncertain laughter.
“The address I have here,” Holliwell announced, “as I consider retranslating it into English, seems very portentous. Culture, as we know, is very much a matter of language and the language before me seems at the moment to be operatic and mock-Ciceronian and absurd. Looking at it, thinking about speaking it, makes me angry. Not,” he hastened to assure them, “that I find Spanish itself mock-Ciceronian and absurd, because I yield to no one in my affection for the tongue of Cervantes and Lorca and the immortal Darío. Only my thoughts, my circumlocutions, my artfulness, seem so in that language.”
Someone slapped his palm against a leather armrest. There were sighs of obscure significance.
“Another dissatisfaction, friends, another dissatisfaction for me is that the subject of this address was to be Culture and the Family or vice versa or the Family in Culture or some construction of that sort. I tell you in sincerity that I am not the man to speak about such things. I know nothing about families—certainly no more than anyone else here tonight. For a large part of my life I had no family at all. The word ‘father,’ for example, was an abstraction to me. I associated it only with God.”
A single Spanish word he could not make out echoed against the polished surfaces of the room. It was answered with a guffaw. Holliwell did not look up. A sadness descended on him.
“When I learned about families—The Family, La Familia—I found only that it was an instrument of grief. That’s all I can tell you about The Family and I assume you already know that much. Moreover, in my culture, we are doing away with grief, so the future of the family there is uncertain. As a consequence the topic may not be relevant, a
nd relevance, surely, is what we require here this evening. In this intercultural exercise of ours.
“But seriously … seriously, my friends …” He paused, stunned for a moment at the wreckage he had piled on himself. “I can certainly talk about culture. It’s my bread and butter and I have no hesitation in talking about it. For example, popular culture is particularly fun. In my country we have a saying—Mickey Mouse will see you dead.”
There was silence.
“There isn’t really such a saying,” Holliwell admitted. “My countrymen present can reassure you as to that. I made it up to demonstrate, to dramatize the seriousness with which American popular culture should be regarded. Now American pop culture is often laughed at by snobbish foreigners—as we call them. But let me tell you that we have had the satisfaction of ramming it down their throats. These snobbish foreigners are going to learn to laugh around it or choke to death. It’s in their gullets, it’s in the air they breathe and in the rich foreign food they eat. They better learn to love it.”
Someone called Holliwell by name but he affected not to hear. A party of Americans in one of the forward rows stood up to leave.
“Our popular culture is machine-made and it’s for sale to anyone who can raise the cash and the requisite number of semi-literate consumers. Compostela is one of the progressive nations that have been successful in this regard.”
People in the back were hissing him.
“Bear with me,” Holliwell begged his audience. “I don’t mean to sentimentalize the various popular cultures that ours has replaced. You can be sure that in their colorful ways they were equally mean and vulgar and trashy. They simply didn’t have what it takes.”
He stopped again, dry-throated, to watch the brisk traffic toward the door.
“Yet I would like to take you into my confidence in one regard, ladies and gentlemen and esteemed colleagues—and here I address particularly those of my listeners who are not North Americans—we have quite another culture concealed behind the wooden nutmeg and the flash that we’re selling. It’s a secret culture. Perhaps you think of us as a nation without secrets—you’re wrong. Our secret culture is the one we live by. It’s the one we’ve beaten into wave upon wave of immigrants who have in turn beaten it into their children. It’s not for sale—in fact it’s none of your business. But because we’re involved in this inter-American intercultural exercise I’ll tell you a little about it tonight.”
A general stir, of hostile ambiance, had taken possession of the room.
“Allow me to recite for you the first poem ever printed in what became the United States of America. It goes like this:
“ ‘I at the burial ground may see
Coffins smaller far than I
From death’s embrace no age is free
Even little children die.’
“Friends, children in the English-speaking colonies of North America didn’t go to heaven to become angelitos. What became of them was terrible to ponder. The pondering over what became of them is part of our secret culture. Our secret culture is as frivolous as a willow on a tombstone. It’s a wonderful thing—or it was. It was strong and dreadful, it was majestic and ruthless. It was a stranger to pity. And it’s not for sale, ladies and gentlemen. Let me tell you now some of the things we believed: We believed we knew more about great unpeopled spaces than any other European nation. We considered spaces unoccupied by us as unpeopled. At the same time, we believed we knew more about guilt. We believed that no one wished and willed as hard as we, and that no one was so able to make wishes true. We believed we were more. More was our secret watchword.
“Now out of all this, in spite of it, because of it, we developed Uncle Sam, the celebrated chiseling factor. And Uncle Sam developed the first leisured, literate masses—to the horror of all civilized men. All civilized men—fascists and leftist intellectuals alike—recoiled and still recoil at Uncle Sam’s bizarre creation, working masses with the money and the time to command the resources of their culture, who would not be instructed and who had no idea of their place. Because Uncle Sam thought of nothing but the almighty dollar he then created the machine-made popular culture to pander to them. To reinforce, if you like, their base instincts. He didn’t think it was his job to improve them and neither did they. This debasement of polite society is what we are now selling you.”
Again Holliwell paused. Voices were being raised but he was not being shouted down. He could make himself heard.
“I have the honor to bring you hope, ladies and gentlemen and esteemed colleagues. Here I speak particularly to the enemies of my country and their representatives present tonight. Underneath it all, our secret culture, the non-exportable one, is dying. It’s going sour and we’re going to die of it. We’ll die of it quietly around our own hearths while our children laugh at us. So, no more Mickey Mouse, amigos. The world is free for Latinate ideologies and German ismusisms … temples of reason, the Dialectic, you name it …”
He became aware of a more substantial disturbance and was compelled to face the room. At the rear, across the heads of those remaining, stood a young man in dark glasses wearing a black shirt and a Richard III haircut. The young man had risen to confront him.
“Is not this facile nihilism, Mr. Holliwell, a screen for Communistic theory?”
A guerrilla of Christ the King, Holliwell thought. The White Hand. He had an instant’s inward vision of his corpse rolling from a speeding car onto the lawn of the Panamerican.
“Isn’t nihilism, sir, a way of discrediting our Western Christian culture which the Communists seek to displace?”
“You can’t be serious,” Holliwell said.
“Oh, yes, sir,” the young man said, with a hint of unpleasant laughter. “Quite serious.”
Stricken by the recklessness of his conduct and reminded of where he was, Holliwell lamely sought a route back toward pedantic convention.
“Do you think that as a replacement for anything lost, I’m proposing Marxism? Do you think that despair leads me to cast envious eyes on Latvia or Kirghizstan?”
“Perhaps you feel for our people,” the young man suggested. “Perhaps you feel that we should look to Latvia or Kirghizstan.”
“What I feel is that I’ve offended you and you’re getting me back. I regard Marxism as analogous to a cargo cult. It’s a naïve invocation of a verbal machine.”
“But heroic? Perhaps inevitable?”
Idiotic as their exchange was, Holliwell considered, he had had it coming. It would teach him. But he was still drunk enough to be angry.
“Sure,” he said. “Perhaps. It’s a funny world, son.”
Now a middle-aged American was on his feet, encouraged by the young fanatic. Faced with revolt, Holliwell increasingly regretted his folly.
“I’d like to apologize to all the Compostelans here,” the American said. “And I want to ask you a question, Holliwell. Did the United States government pay for the display of bad manners you’ve just treated us to?”
“That’s correct,” Holliwell said.
“Well, I’m tired of apologizing for all the so-called experts who come down here on the taxpayers’ money and give the States a bad name. The only time I hear this kind of garbage is when I come to an event like this.”
“Once upon a time,” Holliwell told the man, “there was a chartered aircraft carrying American businessmen and their wives over Japan. The businessmen were insulation dealers from the northern Midwest. They were on a cultural tour of the Orient.”
“What do you bet,” the American asked someone who was with him, “that this little story has an anti-business moral?”
“How can I give you your money’s worth,” Holliwell said, “if you won’t listen to me?” The man sat down in disgust.
“Well, sir,” Holliwell continued, “these folks were being rewarded with this trip for having sold great quantities of insulation. But just as their plane flew over Mount Fuji it broke apart and all the dealers and their wives fell out. They an
d their plastic cups and their Kodachrome slides and their wallets full of pictures of the folks back home fell onto Mount Fuji. On the slopes, their bodies were collected by Buddhist monks and the monks laid them out and burned incense over them and that was how their cultural tour of the Far East ended. Now,” Holliwell said to the American, “is there a lesson in that or not?”
Dr. Nicolay was approaching him.
“I see no point in continuing,” Nicolay said. “I think you should go and rest, eh?”
Before Holliwell could respond, a red-haired woman with broad shoulders and a sad smile rose in the center of the diminished audience. “What about God?” she demanded in an Australian quaver. “Is there a place for God in all this?” Holliwell realized gratefully that she must be as drunk as he.
“There’s always a place for God, senora. There is some question as to whether He’s in it.”
Dr. Nicolay glowed with a smiling revulsion that Holliwell imagined must be Central European. He was at the point of allowing the doctor to supervise his removal when he saw that a honey-haired Compostelan lady had come down along the side aisle and was poised to address him. The lady was striking and her aspect amiable. He waited.
“I could be forgiven, Dr. Holliwell, could I not, if I inferred from your manner and the tone of your remarks that your attitude toward my country is ambiguous?” Her smile was demure, conventual and unthreatening. Holliwell blushed.
“My attitude is friendly,” he said. “I’m sincere.” He had already set in motion the processes by which he hoped in time to forget utterly the evening behind him. It was not pleasant to be compelled to a defense. “I thought I would improvise. I was after a deeper seriousness that I may not have … If my countryman hadn’t already done so I’d consider apologizing.”
“No need for that, sir,” said the smiling young woman. “But isn’t this stylized despair an excuse for immorality? Doesn’t it explain away all duty? Don’t you think your attitude reflects the decadence of your own society?”
“Shall I answer in any particular order?” Holliwell asked.