Their only fault was proneness to obesity in lush pastures, and loneliness when not quartered with those of their own kind and disposition. They were sociable to an amazing extent, leaning upon one another in concert and pulling burrs from each other’s coarse manes with their teeth. They would carry a cringing child, a litter of kittens, or the most dyspeptic woman, and immediately know the difference. They refused, in a sense, to be kept, yet flight was unknown to them. Too good to be true, they would only run toward you. When the Chetvorah barked and lunged at them, they simply waited until the pack got too close, then sent them tumbling with their noses. The Astingi refused to sell even a one. They kept their older mounts long past service, in separate mountain pastures, where they often lived to the half-century mark. And when they died they were buried where they fell, in slightly convex mounds which mirrored the arch of their necks, memorialized with the sharp stones they had always avoided. Not surprisingly, in Cannonia (where it is rightly said that nothing can be done without a count) it was only through the intervention of Moritz Zich that we were able to acquire a brace and allowed to breed. I believe it was their blond presence in the fields about Semper Vero which prevented the Astingi from massacring us when the world turned over.
The drink had had no effect on the Professor’s despondency, though a new map of veins appeared on his nose, and Father led him up the cellar stairs, saying only, “Let me show you something.” There a stallion the color of clotted cream, with a black dorsal stripe, stood in the half-lit stall, a full wagon harness slung like a great indecipherable web upon him. The horse regarded my father calmly as always, for he was as sweet as he was strong. Father only had to reach out and touch the harness for Moccus to shiver with what was clearly delight.
“You see how much he loves it?” Felix said. “Fifty-three years old and still a stud! He loves to haul—the more the better. It’s his freedom, you see. His calling, one might say.” Then he placed the Professor’s hand on Moccus’s flank and the horse began to haul in the stall, as if exercising the concept of burden. His enormous weight creaked the timbers of the stable, and we all took up the shiver of delight.
“Feel it?” Father said. “He’s giving it back to you. Just as with Wolf. Except with Wolf, it was all anger and affectation.”
The Professor’s mind was now on display. I could feel the intellectual machinery encountering the unprovable, converting it into an idea he could grasp.
“It’s bred in him, I suppose,” he said skeptically, “but I’ve never trusted horses.”
Father stared at him. “Some were born to pull at the traces, of course. But the only question is this: what is the message you are sending him? Your touch is quite tentative, and yet he is encouraged!”
“You are saying that I am communicating my skepticism, but I say I cannot help it.”
“Of course, my friend. We ought to encourage skepticism. But there is a huge difference between skepticism and distrust. Intellectuals hardly ever know the difference, in my experience.”
“Yes, yes,” the Professor murmured in a series of rapid shrugs, as if to deflect the argument like a whirring peach moth. “We always forget the ancient brain.”
My father started as if he had been whipped, then broke into that long, low laugh of his.
“Surely,” he sputtered, “surely you do not place full faith”—he was choking with mirth at this point—“with the poet of the Galapagos?”
The Professor blanched as if from a wound.
“It’s the most convincing explanation we have.”
“Balderdash. Only the latest propaganda which everyone parrots and no one reads. The paraphrase, Herr Doktor, enforced in school by drones. Ah, yes, I can recall it now: the mural of the ape as he gradually draws himself erect, losing a bit of hair at each stage of his receding slump, the illusion of progress. A schoolboy’s fantasy, Doctor. So reassuring. Well, it’s as crude as the cartoons of the Kaiser with blood on his hands. Is that what gets you promoted at university these days?”
The Professor did not reply, and Felix could see that he had unwittingly touched a sore spot. He could flush out an unreflective premise like a good dog tracks a wounded bird, and then, while deciding whether the poor, maimed thing deserves a point, look back over his shoulder apologetically.
“I mean, it’s all well and good to say we got it from our ancestors,” Father continued softly, “but then where did our ancestors get it? How did the crocodile acquire a vagina? Survival is easy enough to explain. But how do you explain the arrival of the fittest, eh? There is simply no reason at all why we should exist as a species!”
“Hold on there,” the Professor stammered, as if to change the subject. “Does he not appear to be crying?”
And it was true: several large globules, shining like crystal, were making their way down Moccus’s golden nose.
“Yes,” Father sighed. “Their only fault. They weep constantly.”
“But why on earth? They appear to be kept perfectly. What a life, I should say!”
“The golden age of the animals was just beginning when there were no carts to pull, my friend. The horse, like the nomad peoples, has suffered terribly at man’s hands. What we have put them through! War was a positive relief. It’s amazing they can stand still even for a moment. Evasion was the only weapon they had, and they were always put in the service of the most reactionary class. The dog, by comparison, got off easy, like the West. Which is why for the dog all Asia remains an enemy. The dog remains dumbfounded that the horse, with his history, can maintain his spirit. The horse evades, the dog denies. This is their armory. And the horse weeps, not for Achilles, but because of what we have done to him.”
The Professor himself now seemed about to burst into tears.
“The horse is now only an icon,” Father went on softly, “standing for the remains of what you call our ‘ancient brain.’ But the dog, you see, stands for what was forever lost. All creation and all behavior can be divided among them.”
“Which is why we chose them to accompany us?” the Professor interrupted.
“Oh, surely you do not believe that canard about our civilizing these poor animals! That we used them to extend our senses, haul our baggage, and brilliantly inspire their trust and devotion? No, sir! They came to us quite willingly, out of the wind and rain, as nations go to any murderer if he is able to restore order for a moment. As for the doggie, did we meet as predators? Hardly, my friend. No, we are scavengers. We met across a rotting corpse which neither of us could kill. We are fellow swarmers, social animals, higher maggots, carcass chasers, keeping up with the migrating herds with the energetic inefficiency of our gait. It’s the scraps our friendship lives off; leftovers, marrowbones, and braincases are what make us loyal. They followed us because our merdes ensured their survival. And now we walk behind them and retrieve their feces with our own hands. I have yet to meet a woman for whom I’d do that.”
“Oh, Councilor,” the Professor wheezed as he bent double, “I never thought I would laugh again,” but Father continued utterly deadpan.
“The horsie, now that’s a different story. He knew we and our golden garbage were their only chance for survival, and indeed, that we had perfected their strategies, for no one runs away any better than man. They came to us because as mammals, they recognized both our promiscuity and the horrible length of time it takes to raise the young. Drama, don’t you see? Also, they liked the way we moved en masse. Entertainment! So they became our dependents, and like anyone who throws himself on your mercy, you will eventually let him down. Do you realize, Doktor, that by the doghaus’s own figures, eighty-five per cent of dogs are resold or given back in their first year? And do you know how many times a horse will change hands in his lifetime, or at what age they are sent to the slaughterhouse for dog food? No, the horse tolerates man because he knows there will always be a greater fool among them who will initially lavish him with love; and the dog tolerates horses because he knows that eventually he will eat
them, though not the other way around. They come to us because it is we who decides who eats whom. My Lord, don’t you see? They were the only beings in the world we didn’t hate or fear, the only thing we didn’t immediately feel like killing. And while our vast sentimentality shortens our own lives, it prolongs theirs. Not exactly a Faustian bargain on their part, eh?”
“And which of them do we most resemble?” the Professor queried, now trying to get in the spirit of things.
“Ah, men are more like the horse than anything else. But they sing the lay of the dog.”
“And what might that be?” the Professor sighed like a little boy.
“It goes like this: ‘More life, please. Some mercy, too. Then more life.’”
“Your habit of explaining humans by animal neurosis makes me quite nervous, as you must know by now, Councilor.”
“Think of it this way, Professor: take horses and dogs, take men and women. Origins, values, ends: all different. Think of men and women as horses and dogs who happen to fornicate with one another. Not entirely incompatible or improbable, and looking quite swell when racing together at full stride through a green field. But basically about as much alike as horses and dogs. Now, there I will desist.”
The Professor gave him a sudden, inexplicable, and silent hug. “Wolf is history, my friend,” Felix said evenly. “Believe me, we can do better.”
ANATOMY
(Iulus)
Their friendship had taken on the solidarity of those you grow up with, when there are no secrets. Tiring of alluding to the other by their professions, but unable to move to a first-name basis, they took the nicknames my mother gave them—Scipio and Berganza—from an early Spanish play about two dogs who are always fighting, taking each other by the throat and flinging the other about, but nevertheless inseparable. Wandering astray through the countryside, they occupied themselves chiefly in playing pranks on their unfortunate fellows, chained to a post or locked in their kennels, “always hunting, but unstained with gore.”
They used these affectionate nicknames only when making the most serious of points, clinching an argument, or utterly destroying the other’s most cherished beliefs, though it must be said that Father on his own territory got the better of these, a victory he would one day pay for. The Professor, to his credit, was never afraid of being helpless or at a loss for words in my father’s presence; nor was my father fearful of challenging everything he said, even down to his reading of the weather. It was refreshing for Father to be in the presence of a personality which could not be easily intimidated. They could never let on to their families how much difficulty they were in, and were delighted to find in each other a use for the paternal melancholy they used to batter every convention. They never returned from their training sessions in the fields without boyish catches in the throat, indicating that you consider your best friend insane, but refuse on principle to call the fact to the world’s attention. You could see it glistening on their faces, whether the dogs did well or not, the sense that underneath everything, they had behaved perfectly.
Whenever the Professor arrived, as soon as the requisite papers had been destroyed, he and Father would move off in the victoria with the best trotters and dogs. Occasionally I would stay with Mother; however, on most occasions, I was invited to accompany them on their “rambles,” a word my father abhorred as it implied a chatty English excursion in a fine rain to an unremarkable prospect, a kind of contrived masochism which could only be palliated by a formal dinner beneath a tent with servants in the evening. The Professor would remove his hat, allowing the sun to color his face while he complained of long hours, the unbelievable stupidity of his patients, and the general ingratitude of the world. Everyone needs one friend with whom he can be totally sarcastic and bitter, and Father was aware that his was always in some kind of severe physical discomfort.
“I am not what I was,” he would conclude, and Father would pop the reins, jerking back his confrere’s large pale head in rather too obvious a therapy, for my father’s belief was that no one saw anything clearly—that you were not even in this world—unless your heart’s systole was over 160. Thus he would alternate jupes, jogs, harsh trots, and thundering canters until the Professor acknowledged that he could feel bubbles of energy rising from his pelvis to his ailing heart, better than any digitalis at making the brain pink again.
Here my memory falters, as it will when the subject is the falling out of fast friends, for friendship is a steady state in which all theories are held in abeyance, and the after-the-fact is never envisioned. For my father, the Professor was the childhood sidekick he never had, and in return he brought out both the adventurer and the keen observer in the Professor, so locked in the mire of family, city, and profession. Father brought him back into the world, and more than once when they were standing in the fields he quoted the great Goethe to him in the vernacular: “Quit squinting at the heavens, man. Stand firm and look around you!”
Father also understood his boon companion enough to know this was a man who would find what he was looking for, despite all odds and contradictions, and their friendship depended on him, their forays appearing wholly spontaneous. The Professor’s fascination with my father was that he could not but admire a man who loved his culture, meager as it was, and pressed it to his breast, extracting from his environment every ounce of reinforcement, like a cellist who practices all day and receives so much feedback that he rarely feels the impulse to perform, and lives easily to one hundred.
Only one thing didn’t quite reach Papa’s rich and benevolent skepticism, and that was in noticing that our region, which had sprung up where a dozen tongues and civilizations had clashed, had been created out of the wind and would disappear into it. Our culture, if one could call it that, was not like a horse, which you could pick up positively with your will and put right down again at the front of the race. He spent his life amazed that the Enlightenment his family had brought to the frontier did not take root anywhere, that in Cannonia rights and obligations never moved together.
While he was fully prepared to be the last of his kind, and I suppose took pleasure from it, the rankling question of the breeder still remained. Without rigid controls nothing gets passed on, yet to break the deadlock of mediocrity required something of a revolution. These questions were uppermost in his banter with the Professor about religion, which was something of a soft spot, as you might expect.
“You’re no Jew, Berganza,” he often giggled, “just a Calvinist with a sense of irony.” Add to that his derision of all things German in the clearest and the most precise Hochdeutsch, his love of tradition and contemptuous dismissal of it in the same breath, as well as his distinctly Protestant contribution to Jewish advice—that there is no such thing as a symbol, that depth is just as illusory as surface, that you can make more money selling advice than following it.
Of course, I took my cues from the dogs, for when danger threatens, dogs run away without apology. I had no theory, I didn’t question motives, I made my shifting alliances as best I could. Consistent in my friendliness and friendlessness, I didn’t differentiate. I went to those who were kindest to me, who fed me. I would form new bonds but I was always looking for a better master, so I tended to like everyone.
Eventually the day came when Father’s savage debates with the Professor became subsumed not by discretion, friendship, or even exhaustion, but by having generated such wild analogies that they might as well have been speaking in tongues—though they showed no embarrassment at Mother’s yawning or my own, or at the fact that people moved away from them in pubs.
On one subject they were agreed, that it is in one’s own class that the traitor conceals himself. The lesser nobility’s natural enemy is the nobility, the wealthy, the state from which they extract their privileges. The peasants’ bane is their own kulaks; the bourgeoisie fears only its own petit bourgeoisie, the gentry, its own bailiff. It is one’s truest self, in other words, the self you have just shed, or the one you aspire to
, the soul slightly removed and granted a temporary advantage, who thunders down the pass dressed in party clothes and takes no prisoners. This is the sad story of men who do not make their antecedents clear. And one day while the two of them were riding on the American steam tractor, the Professor straddling the hood and facing Father at the wheel, they agreed that the only interesting philosophical question left was whether it was possible to pass on what one had acquired.
The Professor was obsessed with the fact that human self-consciousness was different from anything else that previously existed, and he admired the dog because his purposiveness was less complicated—he did not spend his days watching himself and doing nothing. Having learned to be actively passive, the dog did not waste time stressing the difference between himself and everything that had gone on before.
In Partial Disgrace Page 20