In Partial Disgrace

by Charles Newman

  But Catspaw was not writing a novel; his was an even stranger form of literature, what the Cannonians call kritiki, which took the form of flinging down his napkin at dessert with provocative statements such as, “Dialogue is the anguish of being,” or “Peace is the terror of dialogue,” or “Clothing is the cause of nudity,” and Father would mildly counter, “Yes, even an X is only a Y,” and then go for a long fast walk. Mother concurred, for why think if it serves only to make you unlovable? And indeed, ours was an era of failed intellectual suicide.

  I believe my parents would have terminated him had they not feared that throwing him out to live on his wits would have brought even more grief to the community at large, so they made the brave decision to sequester him at Semper Vero rather than allow him join the ever-increasing band of failed artists who would hijack the century. Mother no longer spoke to him, but communicated only in writing, and Father listened well-manneredly but did not hear, calling him “that aphorism factory” behind his back.

  But to be charitable, Catspaw’s temperament would have caused anxiety even to those with lesser nerve. He was religious in routine, philosophic in temperament, historical in nostalgia, and avant-garde by default, though lacking belief, analytic ability, knowledge of the past, or real ruthlessness. He blamed his anxieties on the “metaphysical condition of art,” and his moods on the paradoxes of “being itself.” And he often spoke wistfully of the “externalization of internalization.” In short, Catspaw operated solely in that elegant and apocalyptic space between the banal specific and all there is to be known. With superhuman effort, he had turned himself into one of those intellectuals from whom one often comes away from a conversation feeling actually deprived of knowledge. He was right as long as he was talking, but then the silence overwhelmed everything he had just said. All this was further complicated by the fact that his status in our household was unclear—not quite a servant, tutor, guest, jester, savant, relative, or even presence, but rather an up-to-date irritant—a walking, talking reality check, a case study against tolerance.

  Nevertheless, Father took occasional pity on him, inviting him to our Zoopraxinoscope evenings, where Muybridge’s still photographs of animal locomotion were beamed successively upon the wall, Father noting how differently the horse uses its legs in the amble, canter, and gallop, and pointing out with dripping sarcasm how aesthetes—from Altamira cavemen to Leonardo to Gericault—had all painted horses running with all four hooves off the ground, getting the true locomotive posture completely wrong. These evenings always ended with a silent movie of Mother prancing along the diving board as if she were walking the plank.

  “All our movements, like our feelings, are stiff, you see,” Father toasted the images. “We do not dash headlong through space. We do not move the way we feel we move,” he nodded sharply to Catspaw, “any more than we write the way we feel we think.”

  And Mr. Catspaw could be seen later, with his long, prematurely gray hair and dirty cape, wandering the terrace in the moonlight, his upturned waxen profile lost in thought.

  He would be my loyal life companion, batman, and object lesson. For while I felt closer to a cab-horse than an intellectual, no man could ask more from a tutor—one who will try on every up-to-date fashion, regurgitate in your stead the countless mass of new thoughts, so that a boy might cultivate his ideophobia, resist every metaphysical titillation, as well as every stupefying compulsory opinion. In Cannonia, to have a fool attending on you is a mark of great distinction.

  The first thing one noticed about Seth Silvius Gubik was his ability to masturbate with either hand. (He could roll each eye independently as well.) This perfect ambidexterity was extended to drawing (he could simultaneously draw double helixes spiraling away from one another), athletics (he could skip stones with either hand across the widest parts of the Mze), and even the keyboard, where he could perform an anonymous canon of his own composition from two separate sheets of music, the left hand playing a tune beginning with the last note, and the right ending with its first note, recte et retro, alla riversa in the Hebrew manner. He could Germanize the weak and pleasant action of a French piano with a Brahmsian sonority, and with Viennese instruments of delicate touch and bouncing, rolling action he could maintain nuance while adding volume and restless French chromaticism. If no instrument was available, he would beat out a fugue on a log with his knuckles based on the letters of his name. He liked anything in C-minor, and he played with a seriousness which suggested that a new version of the piano would eventually have to be constructed for him. “There’s no use in being envious,” Father said, “it is given to some and not others.” Mother sniffed, “Warm hands, cold heart.”

  Gubik’s hands were neither slender nor large; indeed, his fingers were so thick he had trouble fitting them between the black keys. Yet he could not only reach a twelfth but play chords without arpeggiation. His fingers somehow moved independently of each other, so he could play a Bach fugue with three fingers of each hand, and with all ten invisibly bring out any individual note from a block chord. His perfectly split brain thought of his two hands as one, so the sound was of three. He played impassively with his fingers flat; occasionally his wrists dropped below the level of the keyboard. The motion of his hands was always legible, as if they were moving in sign language. He sat very low on the stool, and always concluded with a single unsmiling bow.

  With such amazing reflexes, it was no wonder that Father preferred him to me, though he did his best not to show it. He was torn between sending him to a conservatory, which he feared would debase his natural talent, and preserving his remarkably intuitive nature at Semper Vero at the cost of condemning him to a life of near servitude.

  Gubik was then almost my age but not exactly my friend, and one tolerated him as one tolerates a genius who is always potentially going to throw things out of balance. If one were interested in symmetry, one would have to say that he was everything Catspaw wasn’t, for if Catspaw was always one step from self-destruction and oblivion, Gubik was always in the wings, ready to step forward as a total presence. Apart from his uncommon aesthetic abilities, it might be said that he absorbed and fed off every scrap of authority that Catspaw squandered, a perfect reverse mime. He was his own school, a true original, a boy willing to grab hold of history, make it conform, and kiss every hand he could not bite. He taught me that the hardest thing in painting is to draw a perfect circle, and the only way to do this is to draw two circles simultaneously with both hands, so that concentration and self-consciousness cancel one another out, allowing the form to perfect itself. This was of course the secret to his approach to the keyboard, and later, politics, where he discovered how to play the feminine masses. (As Commissar for Cults and Education, his lieutenants noticed that he could write a chatty personal letter with his right hand while drafting a government document with his left, or hold a telephone conversation while penciling in sardonic asides on some proposal.) Unfortunately, he became interested in the sort of repertoire which suits the performer more than the listener. With his sad, gentle face, he was precisely the sort of man a poor wretch would seek mercy from, and the very last man who would grant it.

  Gubik was allegedly the illegitimate issue of a deaf and dumb Astingi maiden and a long gone soldier billeted in Silbürsmerze, incurring both the enmity of her tribe as well as the indifference of the local population. Mother had taken her in, given her rooms over the stable, an easy regimen in the house, and had even acted as her midwife—all the more remarkable since Gubik came into the world only a month after myself.

  He was good with animals, all animals, and took to his role as a kind of elevated swineherd, carrying a crook sharpened at the edges like a scythe, diffidently picking up the prized long-haired Mongolian pigs from each village house at dawn, and escorting them to engorge themselves on the fallen fruits and nuts of the forest, supplemented with a mash of beetroot, bird’s eggs, and trout. At dusk they would return in single military file, until each belled pig had turned
in at its own gate. For pocket money he would join the gruff and dirty choruses of those who dragged boats upstream, though he did not take well to authority and had a highly developed sense of injustice. Mother once said that he would “not be happy until every king was strangled in the lap of every disembowled priest, every dwarf stretched out, and every beggar enriched.” When he returned downriver, he would go to the empty church to practice on the echo organ, playing with his rope-burned hands behind his back his own renditions of “The Flight of the Bumblebee” or “Ah! Perfido” holding double-thirds or even full octaves in both hands. Opening the full Rückpositiv and Brustwerk pipes, he drew uncomfortable tremolos from a duplex of the vox angelica and vox humana.

  We played hide-and-seek in the papyrus thickets of the marshes, shouting to each other, “A whistle or cry, or let the game die. Waterman, Wodje Mze, arise!” I crawled like a weasel through the reeds, and when I could smell him behind me, as strong as twice-fortified wine, I turned and threw a handful of mud into his face. But he was too quick for me. Blinded by his vertigo of elbows and knees, he tumbled me into the stumps and swamp water, pushing my head into the muck. It was all I could do to keep my nose above water, and behind me I could feel Charon’s throbbing phallus. I screamed a mortal scream, managed to free an arm, reached up and tore out a gout of hair, and then, encrusted with the tomb-leaves of semen, ran back to the house.

  Certainly, I found this irritating and rather beside the point, but the same scenario would be repeated many times. It was neither erotic nor innocent. It meant nothing in itself, but it presaged much. Though I saw him infrequently, he was always there—I remembered him three times a day, and still do.

  One day Mother took me aside upon my flustered return. “I see you have been experimenting,” she said cheerfully but with melancholy eyes. “Just remember that the wastebin is where experiments should end up, not à la page.” And only our lack of ready cash prevented my seriously deranged playmate from being sent away to school. “One day,” Father said with a shrug, “you will just have to collect yourself, take a step back, and knock him down.”

  I came into the world to replace a dead child, a true sister, pretty, petite, flirtatious, and extremely well-behaved, who lived only a single hour. I do not know if she had a given name. The lintel door of the chapel in which she was buried is inscribed only, “Waterlily of the Mze.” I had strict orders never to play near it—its doors were always locked—so I was inevitably drawn to it like a magnet, and regularly stole away to gaze through the chapel keyhole. Inside, impressive stained-glass windows rose to a cupola hooding a small bell which was never rung. A wine-red banner hung across the sanctuary, on the steps of which was a cushion nestling a broken saber. Once I gained entry through a broken floorboard. In the altar, behind a spring-loaded door, I found a chalice, upon it engraved “The Cup of Sorrow.” Inside the chalice, wrapped in a silk handkerchief, were two perfectly cut stones, one red, one blue. I felt a great solidarity with this vanished playmate, and I knew no one would ever build such a monument to me.

  Her chapel (the last gothic church in the West) had been constructed from the ruins of a watchtower upon a promontory, its bowsprit terrace providing perfect views up and down the Mze. Owls nested in the gables by day and eagles by night, a silent changing of the guard accompanied only by Waterlily’s incessant singing; like me, she sang well before she could speak, throughout the night. She had our mother’s voice; her forzas were like a car hitting a wall, and eventually she mastered even the most difficult Astingi song-cycles, which, tighter than a sestina, go on in the same excruciating fashion—absence, devastation, return, retribution, wedding, absence, et alia, alia, among them Rage Over a Lost Penny; I Am Not Scheherazade; If I Lay Down for You, It Is God’s Wish; It Doesn’t Become You When You Speak; He Who Doesn’t Kiss Her Deserves to Have His Tongue Torn Out; or that showstopper, the eighteenth-century magisterial masterpiece, The New God:

  On a pilgrimage I heard

  the good tidings from a

  conversation between a dog and a cock

  That the Almighty Father was dead

  as well as his Good Lady, his son,

  and the fearsome ghost

  Put in his place is an elderly

  Uncle with red whiskers who

  has only been in jail once

  He understands not a word of

  Hebrew, Latin, or Greek and

  only a smattering of English

  He wears an old black silk top hat

  and a red knitted waistcoat and

  knows all there is about turnips and buttermilk

  He has a rusty old gun but

  no license, and a bad-tempered

  sheepdog whom the angels call “Testy”

  They say he will make a very good God,

  And a much better one for our people

  A great pity they had to endure the other for so long.

  When I returned to her, on Easter or other holidays when the family was otherwise preoccupied, I would open the altarpiece and, taking the stones from the chalice, shake them in my hand like dice—and when I was feeling most like the last son of an inglorious age, she would sing sweetly in the chapel, “So what are you alive for?”

  In those stolen moments in the chapel of my dead sister, it occurred to me what my problem was. I had an âme féminine, a feminine soul. My thick heroic blood had somehow become feminine, upper class, and barbaric, negating modern culture, which makes the feminine masculine, democratic, and artificial. Civilization clung to me like rags. So while playing the man, I have always felt like a princess, a dead princess about to awake and make mincemeat of certain people, and as such I have incurred the fear and hatred of men, particularly if they were important personages.

  My feminine soul was thus always in search of my body, mourning the disappearance of the old kind of artistic male who has died out; a virgin body being serviced by a non-virgin heart. I was a good little boy but a bad little girl, a winning combination. To preserve the appearance of manliness I would eventually take refuge in alcoholic stupor, from which I emerged a drunken and diseased victor, while retaining the eternal priority which was the delight of my feminine soul. I was one of the dead with whom the living have to reckon, a salon bandit, a bathhouse nymph, who would put in jeopardy men’s calm, their faith, and what’s more, their cynicism; female preference always modifying male domination. Oh, I may have been a born imitation, but one so hungry that I could gobble up any ten originals for breakfast. And in Cannonia, where everyone is based on someone else, Waterlily remained my favorite playmate, even more than Waterman.

  The Esteemed Traveler may have noticed that known artistes often resort to introducing just such little choruses of chromatic chums who are mostly empty canvas, whose sidereal appearance illuminates a larger theme, amplifies a point, or assists in pulling through a packthread of some secret motive. But truth be told, there are no minor characters in Cannonia; everyone gets their aria as well as their comeuppance. And in my experience, it is best to keep such folk on the same page, because if they begin to wander aimlessly, like electrons or deviations from a tonic chord, nothing good can come of it. There is nothing more dangerous than a person who wants to become a character in a novel. So when one of these little black keys is sounded, never put the other two out of mind. Their tempos are set well beyond our egos, and if they do not strictly belong to a given key, each character constructs its own society. Whether embracing, confronting, echoing, fracturing, or inverting one another, they are simultaneously all melody and all accompaniment, and as such are difficult to kick out of the composition.

  And what’s most interesting about such people is not the freshness of their entrances, but how, one by one, they disappear.

  CHANGING THE SUBJECT

  (Iulus)

  From his tower suite, Father saw the rented trap careen up the drive and come to a skidding stop, leaving deep, muddy ruts in the oval lawn. Mother had picked up the hysterical pounding of the t
roika miles before and was already on the terrace to greet the stooped and trembling Professor, whom she perfunctorily embraced as she flung a helpless glance toward Father’s window. As they passed in the servants’ stairwell, she told Felix of the tragedy, adding, “Get his mind off it, but don’t even let him near our dogs!” When Felix found the Professor wandering absently in the entry hall, he commiserated with his double loss, took the suitcase from his hand, and dragged him down the cellar stairs beneath the stables, where he poured him a glass of his rarest wine, a priceless triple-pressing siphoned from a small, cobwebbed barrel tucked under his arm.

  “It’s thirty years since I’ve tried this,” he said as softly as he would to a bride, and the mellow liquid topaz dissolved every grain of stubbornness and despair. The vintage issued from a pebbly ridge which produced four barrels a year of Charbah Negra, the most fickle and misunderstood of the great reds, a tart, cloudy, whimsical wine, with a burnt foretaste of iodine, and after a swallow, a scent of rose.

  “Well, other bonds were stronger,” Father continued, after the despairing Professor had confessed his latest defeat. “Wolf is no great loss. He was not much, after all. Why can’t we just say, He forgot you, so you forget him!”

  They drank long draughts of the sweet, apricot-colored essence, and heard the horses tremble the rafters overhead.

  “They grieve with you, my dear friend, they tramp from the injustice of it all.”

  My father’s interest in horses had waned since his youth, as he came to appreciate basic transportation over the expense of crazed beauties, and following the principle that a piano must strive to imitate the singing voice and vice versa, he began to search for a breed of horse whose temperament most resembled the dog’s. It was not long afterward that, while searching in a northern tier of counties where Grandfather Priam had hunted specimen shrubs, he located on the estate of a distant eccentric cousin of Count Zich descendants of the pure Pryzalawski tarpon horse, which in its migration with the Astingi had turned right at the Dukla Pass and kept its merriment and strength in the cold and desolate north, while the rest of the species herded blindly for the Arab Mediterranean to become romantic, slenderankled hysterics, fit for nothing except the mafia and girls’ scrapbooks. These northern animals could both haul and canter, take the family to church and plough, and between jobs negotiate the sharpest ridges at a brisk tolta, smooth as butter with a lonely rider lost in thought. They required no maintenance whatsoever, disdaining both the stable and the feed trough, and stood out in the fiercest blizzards in their shaggy golden coats, pawing through the snow for lichen. What they lacked in beauty—at times they appeared like enormous ponies, all neck, chest, and bulging joints, not well made at all—they more than made up for with stamina. I never saw one stumble, even when it was starving. Needing neither grooming nor shodding, they rolled in the pastures like great thunderclouds to burnish their coats, swam regularly in the strongest currents of the Mze, and trimmed their hooves by clog dancing along rocky escarpments. Only late in life did I realize that as the weather cooled and their coats grew shaggy, they appeared in the distance the exact color and texture of my mother’s pudenda.