In Partial Disgrace

by Charles Newman

  “All cast locally,” Iulus said, pinging the fine legs of each athlete as we passed, humming a local ditty, “Wo ist der Negerstatue mit einer Schlanger in der Hand?” (“Where Is the Negro Statue with the Snake in its Hand?”) I was very happy to be among this bric-a-brac, which appeared so happy to have me among them.

  We passed a neoclassical rotunda without a name, apparently built simply to show off a rare whiterind fir tree, which had grown “naturally” into the shape of a lyre (only one of a number of dendrodological curiosities), and ultimately we strode across a series of low stone humpbacked bridges to the “Freemason’s Pavilion,” a roofless brick and stucco ruin with a blue slate cornice and windows in the shape of five and six pointed stars, surrounded by red beeches and Japanese maples. The stucco had been peeled away artfully from its exposed arches, framing broken Saracen columns and a severely but precisely damaged stairway to nowhere—“Just the sort of place,” my guide commented with his usual abstracted air, “where one might wander from time to time after dinner in the library, and find an unknown guest who might amplify a line of Dante you did not quite understand.” Then we meandered past a group of gnarled olive trees, enormously high, which still belonged to the same peasant family who had refused to sell to any of the former owners, and now towered above even the maples. Its fruit was still harvested by the same family, or rather picked up from the ground after the first winter winds, Iulus related proudly.

  The final stop on our itinerary was his grandfather’s discovery—the source of the Mze. Less was known then about the peoples and gods who occupied the banks of this river than those of the Nile itself. The Mze dove, resurfaced, and redoubled upon itself so many times that it was only recently that people connected its parts. We were climbing the crest of a hill, by no means the highest locally, with the only unlandscaped meadow within the park, when we came upon an empty shack of no discernable function. It sat there in disillusioned clarity, with no nature around or behind it. Iulus pointed out a listing piece of gutter which fed a rain barrel, at the bottom of which a rusted spigot dribbled onto the ground, apparently the origin of four hundred and eighty miles of serpentine river basin. He pointed again to the collection point of the Hermes well and thence to the ponds, one roaring like an engine, the other still as a mote, then to the broken dam and its dry cascade, and finally to a bright, harmonious, and sweet-flowing stream which wound in its infancy to a sluice in the village, where it began to rage from human mismanagement—and shortly thereafter, outflanking and checkmating its own tributaries, confused and inundatory, simply dissolved. We had sunk to our boottops in the sodden grass. The dogs drank happily but appeared bored. Iulus waved us back to the house.

  We had gone only a few hundred yards down the gentle incline when we came upon a huge mound of earth only recently thrown up.

  “An Astingi warrior,” he explained, “no doubt of high rank. They bury them mounted on their horse, even if the horse is alive.”

  “What happened?” I said in my smallest voice.

  “Just another bloody and inconclusive struggle,” he shrugged, and then sighed gravely. “Any disclaimer for lost pasts is childish.”

  But for me, no amount of ignorance or atrocity could take the magic out of Semper Vero, that compact universe of pure play, the promise of a life of singular details and no general upkeep, a life of the given. I was watching myself have an emotion which had no name. It wasn’t exactly love; I was happy in a different way. For the first time in my life I had a companion who I liked precisely because I knew I could never be like him. I was also losing the facility of my sincerity.

  “You are looking at me with such interest,” he said, “that I hope you won’t become disappointed with me.”

  On the terrace we cleaned our muddy boots with bayonets. Through the French doors I could make out nothing but vases of the largest flowers and portraits of the boldest nudes I had ever seen. He let the dogs in and they thudded immediately into a groaning goosedown sofa. He apologized for knowing so little of the history of his own home. This was neither a matter of secrecy nor deception, he insisted; his parents simply did not know nor care about its original functions. Then he offered me a chair on the terrace, sat down on his haunches like a hound, and as he began to talk, a large black crow with brilliant black plumage suddenly alighted on his shoulder.

  “Semper Vero has been in my family for only one hundred years and it has been for sale for most of that time. When my mother’s adoptive father, Priam, inherited the property in the 1840s from a distant cousin, he ignored the architecture, eyes only for the fat warped open volume of the overgrown and undistinguished park. On trains, boats, and carts he brought in rare evergreens from all over the world to make an arboretum, the first devoted solely to that species in the Central Empires—as if what they needed in this vast mountain periphery, filled then with virgin forest, was more trees. This indigenous forest he indeed sold off, wood lot by wood lot, to buy rarer and rarer evergreen seedlings and specimen plantings from other destitute estates. In the buildings, including his own home, he took not the slightest interest. Architecture’s only reason for existence, in his mind, was to give some inanimate organizing texture to the landscaping. But there was not a vegetable shoot in Cannonia whose story he could not tell. I used to follow him on his walks, and when I couldn’t name a shrub, he encouraged me to make one up, and then had a copper nametag made for my little fiction. Perhaps it was a kind of holding action,” he murmured solemnly, “this passion for the evergreen, or perhaps a reaction to the desultory and wanton mining, his hatred for the veins of antimony, quartz, and garnets which had seduced even the Neanderthals. Not to mention his absolute loathing for cattle, which he would shoot without a qualm if they even so much as looked across the fence at a rare shrub.” The crow left his shoulder as peremptorily as it had arrived, but he gave no notice.

  “But then one day, at fifty years of age, when the trees had reached a nice maturity, when the vistas had filled in nicely and all the children grown, Grandfather Priam got up suddenly from supper one evening, took his cape and cane, walked out on the terrace and down the drive . . . and never returned. No one ever discovered what became of him—though there was a rumor of a pilgrimage to a church in the East. At the fullest measure of his life, he simply . . . disappeared . . . as if the genius of his place could only be preserved by his exile.”

  He said this with a tone of surprise as if he had just heard it for the first time, and turning slightly pale, left the subject by motioning to me to follow him down the winding drive where his grandfather had abandoned his little empire.

  The drive had been modestly constructed in such a way as to suggest there was nothing more than a vineyard shack or an abandoned quarry at its end, but I noted its every turning might be defended by a handful of lightly armed men. At each bend, mountain torrents dove beneath severe humpbacked stone bridges, wide enough only for a single cart. These, he mentioned, had been constructed in the thirteenth century for the visit of the Blind King, Agram, who had desired to construct a castle and taxing facility upon the heights. The King with his beautiful dead gaze had been led along the road by the local nobles, winding round and round the short volcano by the longest possible route, until at last the Blind King pronounced the vantage too high and abandoned his project, to general relief.

  As the road suddenly became nothing more than a cart track, one could make out in the failing light the town of Silbürsmerze, taking its name from the glistening carmine and tarnished silver heath which surrounded it. It hung suspended like a faint etching between blowzy curtains of protective mists, the sort of scene you wanted to rub up against to see if the color would come off. We forded the shallows of the Vah across a great sheath of granite, and as we approached, the town enfolded upon itself, like the mighty tribulations of a rose in a second, slightly desperate bloom. Unfamiliar as it was, I could not help but marvel at the peace it yielded, a town that was still connected with our dreams, the dreams we kn
ow are dreams while we are dreaming them and thus effect no fear. For we all walk the ramparts and narrow streets of a town very much like Silbürsmerze, coils of royal blue smoke from peat and fodder fires hovering on her outskirts, where heartbreak remains an aura but is not yet adumbrated, a place where melancholy still gives us character but has yet to become garrulous. Ah, Silbürsmerze: always veering towards sentimentality, but never quite making it.

  At the very center of town we entered an amazingly severe, asymmetrical seventeenth-century square, completely arcaded, continuously vaulted, all friezes, alcoves, and spandrels; curdled tympanas, curved archivolts, and gables with crockets; constructed of molded colored bricks so that not a single square inch was the same color. At the north corner stood a church with a covered double-stair and two towers, one of five rectangles and three domes, the other a Saxon clock tower with an Astingi inscription which Iulus translated as “Each hour dooms Man, the last one kills him.” Squatting down in that off-center square, one had the distinct impression of a sealed, impermeable environ, a kind of conservative utopia, but a short walk to any of its corners revealed a narrow street, lane, or worn stair; Silbürsmerze was all exits. And there was nothing at its center, no statue, bell, or well, nothing but an irregular patch of diseased lawn with a low deteriorating stone wall about it.

  “Be still,” Iulus whispered, “there are a thousand eyes upon us,” and it dawned on me that my interlocutor was the only human figure I had seen since my arrival. The only sound in the square was the strange hesitant clop clop of manual typewriters, hunting and pecking like a hobbled horse echoing across cobbled courtyards. Despite the absence of people, it seemed a place where no one ever died.

  We sat there on the low stone wall for nearly an hour, buffeted by gusts of wind like the exhalations of an excited woman. My sense of mission was growing ever fainter. More than once I turned to my host with some wide-eyed authentic question, but then thought the better of it. The silent depths of that hour in the square, and something in his patient manner, canceled out the earnest gradegrubbing student in me forever.

  Suddenly Iulus clapped his hands to his knees, as if he just remembered something, and ushered me into a half-timbered building with clerestory windows. Loping through an arcaded inner courtyard with a barbarian penile millstone displayed at its center, he went directly to a vaulted basement lit with window wells, an enormous room with Spanish studded leather walls and a black and red marble Moorish fireplace, which in palmier days had served as the town mint. The walls were hung with hundreds of hunting trophies, upon each of which was draped freshly killed game—live meat air-dried upon embalmed meat. From every cornice antlered heads stared with glassy eyes, snipey noses, and erect ears, the tissues of their half-open mouths painted a flamingo pink, maws coated with resin. From these obdurate horns and glistening snouts, from the long faces of forest animals, dangled the marbled membranous cuts of their fellow species—ribs, shoulders, and tenderloins; chops, briskets, and roasts; sausages, organ systems, and scaloppini; intricately carved carcasses, filleted silhouettes of musculature, the missing domesticated relatives’ bodies beautifully butchered and appended to the head of their species’ wild prototype. Haunch of stag venison, loins of flushed forest pig, crown roast of fetal lamb, livers dangling in a small silken net from the tail feathers of a cock pheasant in flight; rigid purple skinned hindquarters of rabbit straddling the figure of a stuffed dancing hare. It was as if the ark itself had foundered and sunk, turned upside down in the shallows, disgorging its drowned and butchered cargo of carcasses into eddies of diffused light. And we floated through this haphazard catalogue of delicacies like calm and purposeful sharks. The folk of Silbürsmerze had been through quite a bit, but it was evident that they would never starve.

  At the very center of this hygienic and anatomically correct abattoir was a blue and white enameled metallic box, the size of a small treasure chest, glowing with a strange out-of-place sanctity, and surrounded by a few landmines with the earth still fresh upon them. Stenciled on the top was the logo “LIBERTY PURE LARD (Roberts & Oake, Chicago, USA).” It had been dropped from an American airplane, killing a shepherd, and they had not been able to identify a single item in it. Inside, along with condensed milk, concentrated orange juice, Cheerios, Mars bars, baked beans, Spam, and soya curds, were several five-pound packages of margarine in plastic globes, a bullet-sized nodule of coloring embedded at each center.

  As I was about to explain the meaning of this gift, Iulus wrestled a hindquarter down from the nose of a particularly proud elk, cut a large chunk from the gelatinous pink mass, and pinning the meat to the table with a knife nearly as large as a sabre, detached the heart of the loin. Then he took a smaller knife from his boot and began to mince the loin with a flurry of strokes. Soon there was a pile of maroon shavings, and he wrapped these in old yellowed newspapers which announced the Russian victory at Kursk, an international congress on physiology in Leningrad held in spite of the siege, and the lead piece, a dog show in Silbürsmerze, noting that the number of entrants was the lowest since the flu epidemic of 1919.

  We put the meat and select items from Chicago in a rucksack, clicked our heels together, put our voices well back in the larynx, shot up our forearms, and with a merciless ironic giggle (which I then believed to be an entirely new form of humor) goose-stepped out of the Meat Museum and reentered the square, which now seemed darker and more claustrophobic than the cellar. Crossing to an elliptical corner, a dark lane at once opened up, and as we left the square it transformed itself back into a trapezoid.

  The houses leaned in upon us, insisting, as with everything else in the country, upon their own manner of collapsing. I was losing both my concentration and curiosity, crushed by the thought of the numberless exhibits I had not yet seen. But my guide had an exquisite sense of these matters, and a clap on the shoulder indicated that our general orientation was about to be concluded. We had indeed come upon a rather astonishing detached house in a relatively new suburban quarter. As was common with Cannonian bourgeois townhomes of the inter-war period, the small front yard was adorned with busts of the resident family—Mother, Father, and two daughters in this case. The sculptor had given each of them the same expression of tranquil pride with a trace of sarcasm.

  The house was of three stories—gray limestone, green majolica tile, and terracotta successively—topped off with a copper mansard roof in which were set two rows of false arches. All this was surmounted by a domed cupola with an open window, from which at this very moment, chin out, tail elevated, and legs tucked expertly beneath him, a red dog leapt into space. A geyser of water erupted from the courtyard as the animal plunged some sixty feet into a raised pool. As we drew nearer, I was aware only of the circular pool, exploding every few moments with another spume, flashes of red fur hurtling across a plum sky, a curved double staircase leading up to flung-open French doors fluttering with torn lace drapes. The first dog who leapt had by now paddled up to the fluted edge of the pool, his bushy muzzle plastered slick as an otter’s, the nails of his forepaws glistening as he hauled himself from the water. He shook himself into a convulsion which began in his jaws and ended with a crack of his tail as an aureole of mist rainbowed about him. As he sat shaking, I was aware of another shape cannonading into the pool behind him, another dashing across the drive spewing gravel in all directions, another taking the staircase in three powerful bounds, the front and rear paws crossing one another at the peak of the gallop, another disappearing through the French doors, another ascending the interior spiral staircase without breaking stride, and yet another bursting from the cupola without a moment’s hesitation, launched into the darkening air in the noblest of freefall frozen poses, until he too galooped into a geyser of white foam.

  I was witnessing the circular blur of a pack, a volley of arrows. Wetted down in elongated suspended flight, each dog preceded and followed his psychopomp in a never-ending chain of pure play. It was as if we were at the World’s Fair booth of s
ome unknown mad little country, where you were not sure if you were watching a film, puppets, wound-up dolls, or perfectly trained animals, or whether this was a ritual entertainment, some veiled protest at an ancient insult, an induced lunacy, or a scientific experiment in which the exact protocol had been forgotten. It was the sort of arresting image one was to encounter often in the conundrum of Cannonia, but when I asked my guide what on earth was going on, he replied wittily but without irony, with one half-closed eye, “Many dogs taking a bath downtown?”

  That’s what I came to love about Cannonia; it may be too much but it never gets too long.

  On the bootscraper back at Semper Vero, dried pomegranate colored mud fell away from our feet like broken waxen molds. Then, as the color ebbed from the sky, we experienced the “wolf-light.” The rocks flared ochre, apricot, and magnesium blue, as a great solemnity pervaded everything. We dined by candlelight on elk carpaccio, blood sausage, hot banana pepper, and coffee dropped in from America. Then Iulus produced a bottle of 1806 Napoleonic cognac. “The Ton-Tin,” he murmured softly, “the bottle which survivors of the regiment drink to those who have fallen. I suppose we are they.” We toasted the past, present, and future, we toasted our parents, our children to be, our friends, each other. We toasted Great Britain, we toasted Russia, we toasted any country we could think of. We drank in memory of countless invasions, oppressions, diasporas, droughts, earthquakes, and sufferings, and we drank to America, the only country, as Iulus reminded me, whose national anthem begins with a question.