“No one is suggesting that he promised more.”
“Scharf is an open book, Herr Professor. He is neither a rebel nor a saint. He is not even suffering in the strict sense, or rather, he suffers from a vagueness of personality, a deficit of character. Upon this you can project nothing, and so nothing comes back. Like the lumpenproletariat, you wonder why he does not rebel against his circumstances, and when you are not wondering about that, you are wondering why he does not thank you for your charitable impulse to keep him alive.”
“This may all be true,” the Professor stiffened, “but hoping for a small progress is a human frailty, which you apparently ridicule. Perhaps we ought to take our leave.”
Felix commenced a shrug, but then apparently thought better of it, and put his arm warmly around his client’s rigid shoulders.
“Do not fear my candor, sir. My friends are well-known and legion, for only the most decent people can put up with me. Let us, you and I, have a confession couleur, a conversation galante.”
Then, before the Professor could object, Felix told him straightaway that Scharf was a hopeless case that only the most intensive treatment and objective stimulation would make an even remotely palatable companion, and that a cure, in any accepted sense of the word, was impossible.
This seemed to intrigue his client as much as it appalled him. But Felix, always conscious of giving value for money, nevertheless tried to put the animal through some paces. He grasped the rope like a lunge line on a recalcitrant pony, and with a flick of his wrists sent long ripples along the rope, which thudded like soft Papuan waves into Scharf ’s vagus nerve. Rather than pulling on the animal, he was sending energy out. It was a trick he had learned from working with horses, and while it worked much less well with dogs, who as a species were more skeptical of excess freedom, he knew nothing better for the moment. It was all in the wrists, all in the body, sending out messages of concern without a sense of abandonment, a gesture usually only mastered by grandparents, and then only for brief, palsied moments.
“The animal, like society, must be taken into liberality without quite knowing it,” Felix spoke soberly as the wavelets left his hand. “It’s the only kind of progressivism that works.” And this indeed became well-known as the “Psalmanazar Method”: to trick the animal in question into self-determination, even magnanimity.
Noting at once the indifference of my father to his jostlings and strainings, Scharf arose trembling, and after relieving himself like a woman, soon settled into a forlorn, circuitous caricature of a gambol, which brought cheers from the Professor and calls for his family. The women returned as one from the brook, as if in a frieze, and watched without the slightest reaction as Father and Scharf slunk in circles around the lawn, negotiating the hydrangeas and boxwood mazes, demonstrating, as the wavelets of energy traveled along the rope, that as dark as the gulf was between them, it was dotted with tiny synapses of fire, and that torpor and hysteria might be transformed with gentle firmness into an acceptable sort of common misery.
Felix brought the dog to a cringing heel before his family.
“Should you find him insupportable, sir, this dog will be just as much at home in an institution as within the dynamics of a family,” Father said genially, handing the rope back to the Professor, and with the other hand offering him a mug of spiked tea. Scharf immediately toppled over on his back and gazed up at the concerned assembly, his head grotesquely twisted to one side, his tongue curled like a scallop in the roof of his hideous mouth. Ainoha suggested a remove to the terrace, where they could more comfortably continue their observation of his progress.
At the end of the day, when the question of money always arises, the Professor suggested a barter arrangement of medical services. Felix as usual insisted on cash up front, noting that he had never been sick a day in his life, and adding, “To tell the truth, no one ever gets ill out here.”
The Professor seemed glum. “If I am not for myself, who is for me?” he muttered aloud.
“It’s not that you won’t find a cheaper rate,” Father said brightly. “However, you will not find a discipline and dedication such as my own at any price.”
The Professor smiled as if to himself. “The dog himself cost nothing. It is the training that is so expensive!”
“It is an expensive business to take responsibility for a nutcase,” Father said without missing a beat. “What other investment does a human make in a dependent who will require your attention every waking hour for half a generation or more, and then congratulate himself when the dependent gets ill that he has saved a few marks? No one will pay the price for careful breeding. I sell my own dogs for a thousand gulden, and I have a ten-year waiting list.”
“I myself would very much prefer to wait ten years, Councilor, but my daughter cannot. Surely, you understand that I cannot simply turn Scharf out. She will accept no substitution.”
“I quite understand the problem, Professor. But the real cost—I say this to you, mano a mano—of demanding total adulation is something you will come to hate.”
“I leave my dog with you,” the Professor huffed, a new bond already established between him and his pet, “and you ask for money as well?” Then he snapped on his homburg in a gesture of virility.
“This is a graver business than you might imagine, my dear sir. Health requires a commitment to being well. How much, for example, do you yourself charge for a sitzung?”
The Professor gazed at his family, glanced at the rope now coiled about his forearm, then looked my father up and down. “Twenty golden marks,” he said quietly.
Felix whistled slowly through his teeth. He gave Scharf ’s ear a gentle tug, for the first time reversing the flow of energy. The depressed saddle of the animal rose and his low-hocked rear legs straightened as he licked his hand. “Then it’s agreed?”
The Professor pulled his beard and replied he would have to think upon it. “It’s quite an exhausting journey, you know,” he added.
“Yes, of course,” Felix said. “But please understand, there can be no guarantees with this animal. It will take a long time and a bundle of money, and even then he will not be quite right. Don’t try to play games with him, because you’re going to lose and make yourself look bad. You can’t impress him. You can’t discourage him. You can’t embarrass him. None of the techniques you generally use with people are going to work with him. The best we can hope for is that he will live out his days with some semblance of social dignity. But first you must get your own family under control. The poor animal is getting mixed signals.”
They agreed to meet again, sans famille, in a month’s time, during which the Professor promised to stop hauling on the animal, and to have all the children practice sending out energy in compliant units along the rope in the manner proscribed, practicing first upon a bed post. They finally compromised on the fee arrangement—a full physical workup in Therapeia with the very latest techniques in diagnoze, in return for a month’s trial training—to which my father agreed more out of curiosity than anything, and the family returned by calèche to catch the last steamer, just before a stream of black thunderheads exploded over the Marchlands.
FATHERLAND
(Iulus)
My father, Felix Aufidius, was an exceptionally energetic and experienced fellow, athletic, gregarious, and priapic, an intense and watchful man with enormous inner territory, infinitely careless yet terribly focused. A hard-drinking old depucelator, an homme de femme who got better-looking as he aged, his angular features were increasingly apparent in the faces of peasant children throughout the county of Klavier. And may I say it was disconcerting to encounter your own little doppelgangers playing in the dusty streets of every village, as I became gradually aware that in effect I was the unwilling leader of a lost tribe. Felix was a big warm man with a smooth cold cheek, often with a heart-shaped lipstick smudge where his beard began. I wished to exceed him only as a tippler and a flirt, and would have happily donned his poisoned shirt.
Born into that century when humankind never worked harder, Felix was known locally as the only Protestant east of the Mze, the quickest gestalt to the west of it, and also as something of a Marxisant—at least to the extent that he agreed that the aim of man was to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening and criticize after dinner.” He was the only man I ever knew who roared with laughter when in the clutches of Das Grosse Kapital. “There are certain mistakes, which only an intellectual can make,” he often said. And if he could have chosen his epitaph, it would have read: “He had brains but not too many.”
In his den (and that word sums it up perfectly), a black velvet curtain bisected the oak-paneled tower suite, on each side of which he pinned quotes from his favorite authors, which he made me memorize, such as this one from the down-to-earth Red Prussian:
In place of the great historic movements arising from the conflict between the productive forces . . . in place of practical and violent action by the masses . . . in place of this vast, prolonged and complicated movement, Monsieur Proudhon supplies the evacuating motion of his own head.
I was in my fifties before I got the gist of that, near Felix’s own age when he clipped it. It was a reminder note that the most difficult intellectual work of all is like that of an unperplexed matador—to allow reality to step forward, then coolly sidestep it.
And I see now that the rote tutorial was apt, for our sensation of history is indeed nothing more than a great black velvet curtain onto which, along with a few sepia cupolas, haunting autoportraits, and vanished landscapes, a great number of pithy quotes have been flimsily pinned. Yet it is only against that opaque curtain of garbled out-of-context aphorisms that individual character can be truly developed, and those who refuse to stand before it never really emerge. Best to ponder it at midnight with some absinthe before a roaring fire.
My greatest joy was rifling through my father’s papers, from which I quickly ascertained that, as heir to Semper Vero, I could look forward to a veritable mountain of debt and virtually exponential taxes; and that my role in the world would be to default, if not gracefully, then with a kind of amusing aplomb, emerging from bankruptcy standing on one finger. Cannonia was the only country in the world where the ledgers were kept in real time, the only government that hadn’t learned to cook its books, and it was my generation from whom the debts of centuries would be called. Felix obviously knew this to be the case, and he also knew he could do nothing whatsoever to protect me, so he indulged my sullenness knowing it would run its course, as well as my acrobatic refusal of something as useless as an identity based on pride of ownership.
No, in spite of his agnosticism, his will contained the most terrible of Christian laws. The Father judges no one. He turns the judgment over to the Son. It is up to him not only to forgive, but pay the debt in full. I wasn’t up to either, and we both knew it.
One day I came across a copy of a letter from my father apologizing to a client . . . “for I must rush home, I so miss my infant son.” Think of that. That there might be something in me he might miss gave me a ridiculous sense of self-confidence, as well as a certain hauteur, and I pinned the purloined letter to the black velvet curtain, nailed it to the cross, between the expostulations of dead patriarchs.
Having mastered his profession early, my father, like most of his class, was unafraid to throw himself without limit into his hobbies, and he was more than content to play the amateur amongst his professional friends. A career could not be sustained any more than any passion, he believed, and so “real life” for him was a respectful if somewhat self-indulgent sideline, the only aim of which was to extract value. He was the sort of person who found irreverence and defiance irresistible, and as the possessor of what one could only call great moral charm, he was proud to take his place as a contrarian crank in a technological, profane, ego-based, and psychologically-oriented world, and mow his lawn on the principles of the Parthenon. Most anyone can orchestrate, but he could retranscribe, reduce a symphony to a quartet. In his heart he had both a sliver of ice and a sliver of gold.
My father’s idea of spirituality was to be in touch with matter and the way it moved, a hands-on mysticism which could have been lethal. For him, touch was the only performance of lasting duties. “If your hands and mouth are wise,” he told me when we first discussed the birds and bees, “virility will take care of itself. And you will seduce all the world, if you like.” He had three golden rules: 1. Ride women high. 2. Never take the first parachute offered. 3. Never go out, even to church, without a passport, 1500 florins, and a knife.
Semper Vero was crossed by the continental divide, marked by a mound made of earth brought in from sixty-three different countries in Grandfather Priam’s time, and not far from there, the Dead Mze broke up and darted underground, emerging again to die in peace one thousand miles away in some Russian marsh. This strange system was most visible at dawn, when the Cannonian countryside appears striped, the underground serpentine aquifers showing up as green squiggles in the sere pastures. In our part of the world, the Living Mze often changed directions, at the whim of its dead, diverted underground cousins, sometimes flowing East and sometimes West, a hydraulics as mysterious as those of the urinary tract, the only human system which remains unexplained by science.
Father was hardly surprised at this. “Nature is apprehended only by asking it a question,” he said to many an astounded visitor. “The river, like time, may flow both ways, but the point is that whichever way it flows, it runnels back into the past before it emerges in the future.”
Often a visitor, beset by literary aspirations, would attempt to amplify the liquid analogy. Count Zich, who knew better, one day tried his hand: “So would you say then, sir, that life is walking alongside a river which gradually disappears?”
“Experience is not a river,” Felix gently riposted. “Experience is countless rivers converging in a damp place, where there is nothing which could be said, in any helpful sense, to be a river.”
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, to find that a man who first thing each morning (with a rifle slung over his shoulder and a book under his arm) checked to see if the river of Grace had decided to flow east or west, might be simultaneously a believer and an unbeliever, a romantic and a moderate, a stoic and an epicure, a yogi without meditation, deadly serious about his whimsies, humorous about death and taxes, reflective and decisive in the same gesture. He was interested in the minimally implausible, and believed that the function of the intellect was to set stern limits to its own pretensions. He had the skepticism of the peasant, the indifference of the nobleman, and the insistence on value-by-critique of the country gentry, and so lived voluntarily in a no-man’s-land on the borders of the intelligentsia, the Astingi nomads, the lesser aristocracy, and bureaucratic squires, thinking of himself as an intermediary metabolite. He was basically interested in secondary differential, a student of nothing so insipid as change, but of changes in the rate of change; not only in the gray-green river, but in the human métabole as well. How does one thing become another? That was his métier. What exactly is it that the hero doesn’t know before he becomes, well, quite something else? That was his subject. What is the opposite of an epiphany? That was his method. What is the opposite of a hangover? That was his temperament. Born when the voluntary sublime virtues were being replaced by the vulgar obligatory ones, he was still of that amorous tradition, unimaginable to modern ears, in which the desire to please was stronger than the need to be loved. A refugee from smugness, from conformity, and from every chosen people, he was the least guileless of men.
He never wasted a word. Either he was telling you something you wanted to know, or you were telling him something he wanted to know, and the ironclad integrity of these encounters somehow never became tiresome. He had a quiet baton, sparing of the superfluous, and an inscrutable beat.
Imagine the difficulty of having a father who was exactly as he seemed to be.
Father rejected
the fashionably tragic and the abnormal, condemned all cults of solitude and unhappiness. As an anglophobophile, he loved people who teased the British. He loathed German misery, German inwardness, German desperation. He particularly loathed Kant for his hierarchies, which placed the dog and the horse somewhere between a stone and us. As an incorrigible improviser, his expansive gaiety of mind struggled against the fathomless boredom which always threatened to strangle our part of the world. Above all, he resolutely denied the cults of Life-Affirmation and Life-Alienation, those elusive twin personages who have washed each other’s hands throughout our dirty century. Yet in his Historae Astingae he was always trying to rescue Nietzsche from being “so damned Nietzschean”; he wanted to tell his tale from the point of view of the brown mare, around whose neck the author of Superman had flung his arms as he died.
No culture has ever made so much and so little of art than the Cannonia of his time. And he was after all, a member of that class—handsome, balanced, and relatively well-off; civic-minded, tolerant, sociable, and progressive—that really had no need of art, and as such ended up as its main patron and audience. Even though they napped through most of it, they somehow didn’t miss a thing. Felix himself was devoted to art while loathing its egotism and vanity. As the most self-reliant of men he knew that autonomy was always overrated. He did not understand why art, when it enjoined any civic impulse, always seemed to degenerate into toadying vapidity, nor why the relentless quest for originality almost always resulted in pointless savagery, lack of sex appeal, and predictable abuse. He was equally amused by what both the clowns of the ruling classes and the damaged narcissists of the avant-garde called thinking. If he was the product of a no longer comprehensible past, to compensate, he prided himself on being a child of his own age. His only real mistake was to think he could compel beauty, and yet he was the only man I ever knew before whom a failed author could sit with ease.
In Partial Disgrace Page 5