He had almost finished setting my place, and I doubt I stared at him for more than a few seconds, but those seconds passed as slowly as drops of water welling from a leaky tap. His face had a horrid simplicity that echoed the decor of the house. His mouth was a lipless slit, his eyes narrow black ovals, his nose a slight swelling perforated by two neat holes; he was bald, his skull elongated, and each time he inclined his head I could see a ridge of bone bisecting the scalp like the sagittal crest of a lizard. All his movements had that awful slowness I had observed in the people of the village. I wanted to fling myself away from the table, but I maintained control and waited until he had gone before I spoke.
“My God!” I said. “What’s wrong with him?”
Mengele pursed his lips in disapproval. “The deformed are ever with us, Mr. Phelan. Surely you have seen worse in your time.”
“Yes, but…”
“Tell me of an instance.” He leaned forward, eager to hear.
I was nonplused, but I told him how one night in New York City—my home—I had been walking in the East Village when a man had come toward me from the opposite corner; his collar had been turned up, his chin tucked in, so that most of his face was obscured; yet as he had passed, the flare of the streetlight had revealed a grimacing mouth set vertically just beneath his cheekbone, complete with tiny teeth. I had not been able to tell if he had in addition a normal mouth, and over the years I had grown uncertain as to whether or not it had been a hallucination. Mengele was delighted and asked me to supply more descriptive details, as if he planned to add the event to his file.
“But your servant,” I asked. “What of him?”
“Merely a decoration,” he said. “A creature of my design. The village and the woods abound with them. No doubt you will encounter a fair sampling on your walk along the Pilcomayo.”
“Your design!” I was enraged. “You made him that way?”
“You cannot have expected my work to have an angelic character.” Mengele paused, thoughtful. “You must understand that what you see here, the villagers, the house, everything, is a memorial to my work. It has the reality of one of those glass baubles that contain wintry rural scenes and when shaken produce whirling snowstorms. The same actions are repeated over and over, the same effects produced. There is nothing for you to be upset about. The people here are content to serve me in this fashion. They understand.” He pointed to the plates in front of me. “Eat, Mr. Phelan. Time is pressing.”
I looked down at the plates. They were black ceramic. One held a green salad, and the other slices of roast beef swimming in blood. I have always enjoyed rare beef, but in that place it seemed an obscenity. Nonetheless, I was hungry, and I ate. And while I did, while Mengele told me of his work in genetics—work that had created monstrosities such as his servant—I determined to kill him. We were natural enemies, he and I. For though I had no personal score to settle, he exulted in the dissolution that I had spent most of my postwar life in avoiding. It was time, I thought, to do more than avoid it. I decided to take the knife with which I cut my beef and slash his throat. Perhaps he would appreciate the simplicity.
“Naturally,” he said, “the creation of grotesques was not the pinnacle of my achievements. That pinnacle I reached nine years ago when I discovered a means of chemically affecting the mechanisms that underlie gene regulation, specifically those that control cell breakdown and rebuilding.”
Being no scientist, I was not sure what he meant. “Cell breakdown?” I said. “Are you…”
“Simply stated,” he said, “I learned to reverse the process of aging. It may be that I have discovered the secret of immortality, though it is not yet clear how many treatments the body will accept.”
“If that’s true, why haven’t you treated yourself?”
“Indeed,” he said with a chuckle. “Why not?”
There was no doubt in my mind that he was lying about his great triumph, and this lie—which put into an even darker perspective the malignancy of his work, showing it to be purposeless, serving no end other than to further the vileness of his ego—this lie firmed my resolve to kill him. I gripped the knife and started to push back my chair; but then a disturbing thought crossed my mind. “Why have you revealed yourself to me?” I asked. “Surely you know that I’m liable to mention this to someone.”
“First, Mr. Phelan, you may never have a chance to mention it; a twenty-five-kilometer walk along the Pilcomayo is no Sunday stroll. Second, whom would you tell? The officialdom of this country are my associates.”
“What about the Israelis? If they knew of this place, they’d be swarming all over you.”
“The Israelis!” Mengele made a noise of disgust. “They would not find me here. Tell them if you wish. I will give you proof.” He opened a drawer in the end of the table and from it removed an ink bottle and a sheet of paper; he poured a few drops of ink onto the paper, and after a moment pressed his thumb down to make a print; then he blew on the paper and slid it toward me. “Show that to the Israelis and tell them I am not afraid of their reprisals. My work will go on.”
I picked up the paper. “I suppose you’ve altered your prints, and this will only prove to the Israelis that I’m a madman.”
“These fingerprints have not been altered.”
“Good.” I folded the paper and stuck it into my shirt pocket. Knife in hand, I stood and walked along the table toward him. I am certain he knew my intention, yet his bemused expression did not falter; and when I reached his side he looked me in the eyes. I wanted to say something, pronounce a curse that would harrow him to hell; his calm stare, however, unnerved me. I put my left hand behind his neck to steady him and prepared to draw the blade across his jugular. But as I did, he seized my wrist in a powerful grip, holding me immobile. I clubbed him on the brow with my left hand, and his head scarcely wobbled. Terrified, I tried to wrench free and managed to stagger a few paces away, pulling him after me. He did not attack; he only laughed and maintained his grip. I battered him again and again, I clawed at his face, his neck, and in so doing I tore the buttons from his shirt. The two halves fell open, and I screamed at what I saw.
He flung me to the floor and shrugged off the torn shirt. I was transfixed. Though he was still hunched, his torso was smooth-skinned and powerfully muscled, the torso of a young man from which a withered neck had sprouted; his arms, too, bulged with muscle and evolved into gnarled, liver-spotted hands. There was no trace of surgical scarring; the skin flowed from youth to old age in the way a tributary changes color upon merging with the mainstream. “Why not?” he had answered when I asked why he did not avail himself of his treatments. Of course he had, and—in keeping with his warped sensibilities—he had transformed himself into a monster. The sight of that shrunken face perched atop a youthful body was enough to shred the last of my rationality. Ablaze with fear, I scrambled to my feet and ran from the room, bursting through the main doors and down the piney slope, with Mengele’s laughter echoing behind.
Night had fallen, a three-quarter moon rode high, and as I plunged along the path toward the river, in the slants of silvery light piercing the boughs I saw the villagers standing by the doors of their cottages. Some moved after me, stretching out their arms…whether in supplication or aggression, I was unable to tell. I did not stop to take note of their particular deformities, but glimpsed oblate heads, strangely configured hands, great bruised-looking eyes that seemed patches of velvet woven into their skins rather than organs with humors and capillaries. Breath shrieked in my throat as I zigzagged among them, eluding their sluggish attempts to touch me. And then I was splashing through the shallows, past the wreckage of my plane, past those godforsaken slopes, panicked, falling, crawling, sending up silvery sprays of water that were like shouts, pure expressions of my fear.
Twenty-five kilometers along the Río Pilcomayo. Fifteen miles. Twelve hours. No measure could encompass the terrors of that walk. Mengele’s creatures did, indeed, abound. Once, while pausing to catch my brea
th, I spotted an owl on a branch that overhung the water. A jet-black owl, its eyes glowing faintly orange. Once a vast bulk heaved up from midstream, just the back of the thing, an expanse of smooth dark skin: it must have been thirty feet long. Once, at a point where the Pilcomayo fell into a gorge and I was forced to go overland, something heavy pursued me through the brush, and at last, fearing it more than the rapids, I dove into the river; as the current bore me off, I saw its huge misshapen head leaning over the cliff, silhouetted against the stars. All around I heard cries that I did not believe could issue from an earthly throat. Bubbling screeches, grinding roars, eerie whistles that reminded me of the keening made by incoming artillery rounds. By the time I reached the village of which Mengele had spoken, I was incoherent and I remember little of the flight that carried me to Asunción.
The authorities questioned me about my accident. I told them my compass had malfunctioned, that I had no idea where I had crashed. I was afraid to mention Mengele. These men were his accomplices, and besides, if his creatures flourished along the Pilcomayo, could not some of them be here? What had he said? “The deformed are ever with us, Mr. Phelan.” True enough, but since my experiences in his house it seemed I had become sensitized to their presence. I picked them out of crowds, I encountered them on street corners, I saw the potential for deformity in every normal face. Even after returning to New York, every subway ride, every walk, every meal out, brought me into contact with men and women who hid their faces—all having the gray city pallor—yet who could not quite disguise some grotesque disfigurement. I suffered nightmares; I imagined I was being watched. Finally, in hopes of exorcising these fears, I went to see an old Jewish man, a colleague of Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter.
His office in the East Seventies was a picture of clutter, with stacks of papers and folios teetering on his desk, overflowing file cabinets. He was as old a man as Mengele had appeared, his forehead tiered by wrinkles, cadaverous cheeks, weepy brown eyes. I took a seat at the desk and handed him the paper on which Mengele had made his thumbprint. “I’d like this identified,” I said. “I believe it belongs to Josef Mengele.”
He stared at it a moment, then hobbled over to a cabinet and began shuffling through papers. After several minutes he clicked his tongue against his teeth and came back to the desk. “Where did you get this?” he asked with a degree of urgency.
“Does it match?”
He hesitated. “Yes, it matches. Now where did you get it?”
As I told my story, he leaned back and closed his eyes and nodded thoughtfully, interrupting me to ask an occasional question. “Well,” I said when I had finished. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. There may be nothing I can do.”
“What do you mean?” I said, dumbfounded. “I can give you the exact position of the village. Hell, I can take you there myself!”
He let out a weary sigh. “This”—he tapped the paper—“this is not Mengele’s thumbprint.”
“He must have altered it,” I said, desperate to prove my case. “He is there! I swear it! If you would just…” And then I realized something. “You said it matched?”
The old man’s face seemed to have sagged further into decay. “Six years ago a man came to the office and told me almost verbatim the story you have told. I thought he was insane and threw him out, but before he left he thrust a paper at me, one that bore a thumbprint. That print matches yours. But it does not belong to Mengele.”
“Then it is proof!” I said excitedly. “Don’t you see? He may have altered it, but this proves that he exists, and the existence of the village where he lives.”
“Does he live there?” he asked. “I’m afraid there is another possibility.”
I was not sure what he meant at first; then I remembered Mengele’s description of the village. “…what you see here, the villagers, the house, everything, is a memorial to my work. It has the reality of one of those glass baubles that contain wintry rural scenes and when shaken produce whirling snowstorms.” The key word was “everything.” I had likened the way he had paused before giving answers to rummaging through a file, but it was probably more accurate to say he had been recalling a memorized biography. It had been a stand-in I had met, a young man made old or the reverse. Mengele was many years gone from the village, gone God knows where and in God knows what disguise, doing his work. Perhaps he was once again the fleshy, smiling man whose photograph I had seen as a child.
The old man and I had little else to say to one another. He was anxious to be rid of me; I had, after all, shed a wan light on his forty years of vengeful labor. I asked if he had an address for the other man who had told him of the village; I thought he alone might be able to offer me solace. The old man gave it to me—an address in the West Twenties—and promised to initiate an investigation of the village; but I think we both knew that Mengele had won, that his principle, not ours, was in accord with the times. I felt hopeless, stunned, and on stepping outside I became aware of Mengele’s victory in an even more poignant way.
It was a gray, blustery afternoon, a few snowflakes whirling between the drab facades of the buildings; the windows were glinting blackly, reflecting opaque diagonals of the sky. Garbage was piled in the gutters, spilling onto the sidewalks, and wedges of grimy crusted snow clung to the bumpers of the cars. Hunched against the wind, holding their coat collars closed over their faces, pedestrians struggled past. What I could see of their expressions was either hateful or angry or worried. It was a perfect Mengelian day, all underpinnings visible, everything pared down to ordinary bone; and as I walked along, I wondered for how much of it he was directly responsible. Oh, he was somewhere turning out grotesques, working scientific charms, but I doubted his efforts were essential to that gray principle underlying the factory air, the principle he worshiped, whose high priest he was. He had been right. Good was eroding into evil, bright into dark, abundance into uniformity. Everywhere I went I saw that truth reflected. In the simple shapes and primary colors of the cars, in the mad eyes of the bag ladies, in the featureless sky, in the single-minded stares of businessmen. We were all suffering a reduction to simpler forms, a draining of spirit and vitality.
I walked aimlessly, but I was not surprised to find myself some time later standing before an apartment building in the West Twenties; nor was I any more surprised when shortly thereafter a particularly gray-looking man came down the steps, his face muffled by a scarf and a wool hat pulled low over his brow. He shuffled across the street toward me, unwrapping the scarf. I knew I would be horrified by his deformity, yet I was willing to accept him, to listen, to hear what comforts deformity bestowed; because, though I did not understand Mengele’s principle, though I had not dissolved in it or let it rule me, I had acknowledged it and sensed its inevitability. I could almost detect its slow vibrations ringing the changes of the world with—like the syllables of Mengele’s name—the sullen, unmusical timbre of a deadened bell.
OTHER THAN THE Sichi Collection, Cattanay’s only surviving works are to be found in the Municipal Gallery at Regensburg, a group of eight oils-on-canvas, most notable among them being Woman With Oranges. These paintings constitute his portion of a student exhibition hung some weeks after he had left the city of his birth and traveled south to Teocinte, there to present his proposal to the city fathers; it is unlikely he ever learned of the disposition of his work, and even more unlikely that he was aware of the general critical indifference with which it was received. Perhaps the most interesting of the group to modern scholars, the most indicative as to Cattanay’s later preoccupations, is the Self-Portrait, painted at the age of twenty-eight, a year before his departure.
The majority of the canvas is a richly varnished black in which the vague shapes of floorboards are presented, barely visible. Two irregular slashes of gold cross the blackness, and within these we can see a section of the artist’s thin features and the shoulder panel of his shirt. The perspective given is that we are looking down at the a
rtist, perhaps through a tear in the roof, and that he is looking up at us, squinting into the light, his mouth distorted by a grimace born of intense concentration. On first viewing the painting, I was struck by the atmosphere of tension that radiated from it. It seemed I was spying upon a man imprisoned within a shadow having two golden bars, tormented by the possibilities of light beyond the walls. And though this may be the reaction of the art historian, not the less knowledgeable and therefore more trustworthy response of the gallery-goer, it also seemed that this imprisonment was self-imposed, that he could have easily escaped his confine; but that he had realized a feeling of stricture was an essential fuel to his ambition, and so had chained himself to this arduous and thoroughly unreasonable chore of perception…
—from Meric Cattanay:
The Politics of Conception
by Reade Holland, Ph.D.
I
In 1853, in a country far to the south, in a world separated from this one by the thinnest margin of possibility, a dragon named Griaule dominated the region of the Carbonales Valley, a fertile area centering upon the town of Teocinte and renowned for its production of silver, mahogany, and indigo. There were other dragons in those days, most dwelling on the rocky islands west of Patagonia—tiny, irascible creatures, the largest of them no bigger than a swallow. But Griaule was one of the great Beasts who had ruled an age. Over the centuries he had grown to stand 750 feet high at the midback, and from the tip of his tail to his nose he was six thousand feet long. (It should be noted here that the growth of dragons was due not to caloric intake, but to the absorption of energy derived from the passage of time.) Had it not been for a miscast spell, Griaule would have died millennia before. The wizard entrusted with the task of slaying him—knowing his own life would be forfeited as a result of the magical backwash—had experienced a last-second twinge of fear, and, diminished by this ounce of courage, the spell had flown a mortal inch awry. Though the wizard’s whereabouts was unknown, Griaule had remained alive. His heart had stopped, his breath stilled, but his mind continued to seethe, to send forth the gloomy vibrations that enslaved all who stayed for long within range of his influence.
The Jaguar Hunter Page 42