Letizia Rubicondi looked like a beauty in a sixteenth-century Italian painting, and such beauty terrifies most men, except for the occasional oaf who has not the sensitivity to fear it or, at the opposite extreme, refined and self-confident natures such as that of MacBride who made her an offer she could refuse: promotion from lettrice to permanent teaching staff in the following academic year in exchange for allowing him to share her bed – his being occupied by the stout, agreeable and extremely loyal lady who was his wife and mother of the well-buttoned offspring. Letizia was a new friend – not a replacement for Anne, as she was not inclined to quixotic demonstrations of solidarity, but she had a fiercely independent character that Maeve admired and learnt from.
One day, Maeve plumped herself down on an armchair in Letizia’s study and said, “These shells, our bodies – what an effort it is to lug them around, and they need such pampering even when, like mine, they’re overweight and unattractive. Fed, watered, scrubbed, clothed and covered with all sorts of pongs and potions. How many industries flourish, how much commerce feeds the assets of wealthy men, and even how many wars are fought to secure the safety and comfort of these fragile bags of flesh, which must wither in all events?”
“Well, off you go like the anchorites into the desert to eat berries. You’ll forgive me if I don’t join you,” laughed Letizia Rubicondi.
“But it’s all right for you,” said Maeve indicating, not without a little distaste, Rubicondi’s well-styled and well-garmented form. Why, she thought, are Italian feminists allowed to dress like man-killers in tight shirts and high heels, with perfectly made-up faces and manicured nails? “Look at what I have to drag around. And why do all men, whether ugly or good-looking, think that all of us, unclad and defenceless to their amorous needs, should resemble the latest Hollywood anorexic.”
“Defenceless to their amorous needs? Oh dear, you are fucked up,” Letizia passed sentence. “Personally I have always thought that they would like to put it anywhere, and find making love to us only marginally more attractive than doing the same thing to a watermelon.” Letizia demonstrated once again that, contrary to popular belief, Northern Europeans are more romantic, while if you want truly unromantic and indeed cynical attitudes to sex, you need to go to the south of the continent. “Although it has to be admitted that a watermelon is no good when it comes to decorating a bar stool. That is why I never go out in the evening accompanied by a man: they always want to parade you like a trophy. That’s why I keep my sex life and my social life entirely separate.”
Maeve, who had been to bed with very few men – all fumbling, awkward encounters – and had never known one who wanted to parade her like a trophy, blushed at her friend’s explicitness and self-confidence. It wasn’t just about sex, and she decided to take the conversation in a different direction.
“Look, the brain is some kind of computer, but you just switch a computer on and as soon as it gets its electric current, which is instantaneous, it starts to work in an entirely reliable fashion. But the brain is so fussy and so dependent on a healthy body. It gets tired. It doesn’t like your drinking habit. It absolutely hates your insomnia, and becomes uncontrollable in the face of over fifty undergraduates.”
“Well, for starters,” came the smiling reply from Letizia, who always found complex subjects reassuringly simple, as her brain contained one of those old-fashioned filing cabinets, the wooden ones with tiny drawers for holding index cards: everything has a category and everything can be filed away. There is no room for doubt or crossover. “Well, for starters, our brain is not a computer [it was filed under ‘b’ and not under ‘c’, she presumably meant], and it has intuition, which is simply jumping to a conclusion before you have sufficient evidence. A computer doesn’t do that kind of tomfoolery. It applies absolute rigour, while our brains are, at best, dysfunctional computers.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Maeve, uncertain as to where she should start her response. It struck her that Letizia was much more impressive when she was talking about sex. “All that defragging business: isn’t that a bit like sleep – and dreaming? After all what is sleep, if not sorting out our brains and getting them ready for the next day, but computers do it so quickly; they defrag in a couple of minutes, whereas we lose a third of our life. It is the terrible inefficiency of it all that irritates me.”
“So we’re in agreement. The brain is at best a dysfunctional computer,” Letizia reasserted.
“Well, not really! The brain, like everything that makes up a human being, is both remarkable and rather clumsily constructed. Yet another demonstration of how we must have been designed by evolution, although designed is not the right word. ‘Designed by evolution’ is an oxymoron.”
“I’ll argue against myself here,” says Letizia grandly. “Computers, if they were designed from scratch now with the knowledge we have accumulated – with hindsight, as it were – would be designed differently from what they have become. Because they too have evolved step by step, and the design of each generation of computer is constricted by the format of the previous one. That is a bit like evolution, isn’t it.”
“You’re right, Letizia, but I was only using a metaphor when I first said that the brain is a computer. It isn’t really a computer, because it contains the ghost of consciousness.”
“Now, you’re being silly. Next you’ll be believing in God and all that tomfoolery,” Letizia said, displaying that endearing habit of people speaking a language that is not their own: the over-frequent use of a low-frequency word for no other reason than the speaker’s irrational pleasure in articulating the word in question, often because that word would be quite inconceivable in their native tongue.
“Is it silly not to know?” Maeve asked.
Letizia sat on Maeve’s chair-rest and put her arm around her. “You are far too serious, my dear,” she whispered. “That is why I find you so entertaining. You’re coming out with me tonight. I’m going to show you off and give you a good time.”
Maeve suddenly felt a little weepy. “You wouldn’t find it so entertaining if you knew what I have to put with. If you had colleagues like Harvey MacBride and Cameron Murray…”
Letizia removed her arm and stood up. “Come off it, Maeve! What are you looking for? A knight in shining armour. They don’t exist and never did.” Maeve’s eyes began to burn and she thought to herself that Letizia clearly didn’t have an index card for Anne Bartlett. “MacBride’s a jerk,” Letizia continued, “and so is Murray. So what? They’re like the weather: you have to put up with them as part of reality. The storm comes in, and then it blows itself out. And you’re still here, working away as you always do. I’d put my money on you, any day. You’ll pull through, but stop feeling sorry for yourself. You need le palle – balls. What you call guts in your language. What a strange lot you are! I tell you what: you’re coming out with me tonight and I’m not taking no for an answer.” And so a kind of friendship grew stronger. Letizia would continue to push Maeve into having a more relaxed relationship with her own body, and Maeve would continue to resist, because her resistance came from her nature and could not be overcome by intellectual argument.
And we might have been a little too hard on MacBride, as who can blame him for the inconstancy of his values, the hypocritical manner in which he displayed them, his bullying of faculty and students alike, and his ruthless exploitation of Maeve, which I have described, albeit somewhat summarily? We have to admit that his behaviour was perfectly adapted to survival in the delightful and enlightened environment we categorise as academia. In no other sphere of activity is reputation so important and carefully cultivated or projected onto society like a magic lantern. In no other trade are personal politics, committee-controlling, grand gestures and conspiracy so important. What? Even worse than politicians? you ask incredulously. Well indeed, politicians are more dangerous because they have real power; if, however, the world were run by academics, there would very probably be more war and mayhem, not less. So we s
hould be thankful that our ingenious societies have found the means of channelling these people into careers where their cantankerous rivalries can do no real harm or lasting damage to society at large.
And the proof of what I say can be found in the history of Doctor Harvey MacBride himself. His self-help book, Shit on Everyone Else, or How to be a Great Writer or Artist, so touched the spirit of our times that it became a “runaway bestseller”. In it he explained what had already seemed an established fact: everyone has a novel in them or in the drawer or in their soul or in some other place. Presumably we all also have a marathon, a sculpture and a very successful business enterprise in us, if only we could find the right success manuals and be bothered to follow their advice carefully, thus unleashing on the world huge numbers of frustrated writers, runners, sculptors and businessmen. That’s already happened, you say. Quite right, but there is still a market for this stuff. MacBride followed a tried and tested formula: success relies on self-belief and is interfered with only when you start to weaken and take other people’s feelings into account. Success is a matter of focus and ruthlessness, and the object is to sell oneself as one would any other “product”. This populist treatise was followed by the equally successful Being a Bastard Gets You to the Top or How to Be a Successful Politician or Captain of Industry and the slightly more original Method Acting as a Way of Life, which explained how the skills of dissembling anger, moral outrage, concern and sincerity can be used to further almost any career. He too was invited onto TV chat shows and was such a success that he became a permanent fixture. Of course, his colleagues no longer took him seriously: how could they? – he had written books that everyone wanted to read. To his great credit, he too started to take himself less seriously. He continued his academic career in a very desultory fashion, dropped off all the committees and didn’t finish his monograph on whether Goethe visited Pumpernickel for one afternoon in the autumn of 17**. His bank balance grew and he became very relaxed, but the bank balance was not that important as he showed great generosity and gave half of it to a charity drilling artesian wells in Africa. When Cameron Murray, who shortly afterwards would succumb to an unpleasant accident involving a plate of strozzapreti, stopped him in the corridor and provocatively said, “You do realise that those books of yours are crap!” MacBride replied, “You’re wrong. They’re complete crap,” and bounced off laughing at his own feeble joke. In short, a bad book liberated its author and made him a better man.
But you the reader and I the writer of these lines have not led blameless lives, and if fate had landed us in one of those pleasure gardens of learning, might we not have behaved just like him? Surely our professions account for ninety per cent of who we are. Our own contribution is slight, although we do not like to think so. And one final word on this subject: when it comes to writers, translators and all those who push a pen for no other reason than to turn an elegant phrase or shape an original thought (if such things exist), keep a very wide berth but read our books, as we are, on the whole, a penniless lot and our egos are made of material fragile to the touch of reality.
And so in the end Maeve became head of department and, wonderfully, was reunited all day long with the studies she loved. She took joy too in the successes of the staff she recruited, even when they eclipsed her own. And they rewarded her by relaxing into their work and putting aside those university politics of which we spoke. And they loved her dearly and few would countenance the idea of leaving because, although we humans consume our lives in bickering and plotting and spreading false rumour “to better ourselves” and our families, the thing we really desire is to work in harmony and concert with each other. It is circumstance, shall we say, that makes us do what we do aided, no doubt, by that weakness we so often call strength or ambition. But always we want for something better.
And how uplifting are these light satires? I am weeping while I write, as I seldom indulge in happy endings, as you will find out if you persevere with this book. What’s this? You’re not happy? You say that her emotional life is not complete. I am not writing for Hollywood, and not every happy ending requires a man and a woman to get together (or two men or two women, for that matter). Look, if you want heterosexual heaven along with an estate and an income of three (hundred) thousand a year, forget it or read one of the classics.
For us sweet cynics of our modern age, the emphasis has changed – and for the better I would say: a shred of progress now that progress seems an unlikely claim.
The Difficulty Snails Encounter in Mating
25 September 2004
Dear Gottfried,
Since you have joined International Comestible Commodities, I have been very impressed by your honesty, intelligence and dedication. I feel that you are similar to the young man I was when I joined the firm fifteen years ago, and I will go further: I see in you a worthy successor to my own post. It is only a matter of time before I am promoted to Head of Commodity Movements, as green tea has for many years been outperforming all other commodities in spite of its marginality.
For this reason, I have chosen to give you some advice, so that you can avoid the terrible errors I made during the first ten years of my career. I probably appear to you as a person who has always known his business – destined, as it were, to success and position. What I am going to tell you will reveal the weaker side of my character that has now been conclusively overcome. I will reveal my sufferings in the hope that you will avoid similar ones.
In our line of business, we must avoid the distractions of permanent personal relationships, and I have no doubt that my story will convince you of this undeniable truth. We understand it intellectually, but so often we allow our irrational feelings to govern our sound intellects. Remember, the market is the great teacher and there is nothing outside it that is not a distraction, although distractions fall into two categories: those that are pleasant and recreational – to be indulged in to a proper and measured degree – and those that are offensive, nauseating and ultimately dangerous. It doesn’t matter, really, what commodity you trade in; it is by trading that we perform an essential function for the betterment of our societies and it is this that justifies our high salaries and the privileges we hold. We owe it to society to keep ourselves focused on the primary task – for us and all those people who rely upon us.
I know that you come from a rural background in Austria, and you must find K***, our beautiful city in the heart of Europe, at times overwhelming and full of allurements and deceitful temptations. I was born in this city and yet I fell into one of its snares. How much more difficult it must be for you, a relatively unsophisticated country boy.
So I write in a spirit of brotherhood and solidarity with a fellow human being setting out on this exhilarating career of hard work, conquest and wealth for the sake of a society that is often envious and dismissive of our achievements. We are a more civilised and evolved version of the medieval knights. Daily we fight to protect the borders of our civilisation which are now virtual rather than geographic, and those who struggle in their mundane lives beneath us can never understand the risks we run and the sacrifices we make.
The first thing you must understand is the importance of a regular and cleanly life. I generally wake early, about three hours before I go to work. The reason for this sacrifice is quite simple: I need to defend my flat against myself and against anyone else who might enter its agreeable, spacious and whitewashed walls. I, Robert Finnick, am required to defend my own home against Robert Finnick for the sake of Robert Finnick. This may seem very strange to those who have not thought about it in any great depth, but my behaviour, far from odd, is based on very sound science. The problems start with the fact that Robert Finnick is in the habit of breathing – that is inhaling healthy air and exhaling an unhealthy version that replaces the oxygen content with carbon dioxide. I am not concerned about my own minuscule contribution to the greenhouse gases that are apparently destroying our world, a question that I leave to the United Nations, G8 and all tho
se politicians who are paid good money by the taxpayer precisely to worry about such matters. What concerns me is that every exhalation contains warm, moist and corrosive air that attacks everything I have paid for with good money. Then there is the question of my footfall across the well-polished floors of my flat. These jolts constantly erode the fabric of the building in which I have invested considerable wealth earned, I might add, at the cost of not inconsiderable effort on my own part. I am, it is true, very careful to tread lightly and wear the appropriate footwear, but the laws of physics deny the possibility of a zero-attrition footstep. I am of course very careful to invite as few people into the flat as possible, which, I think you will agree, is a very sensible precaution for many reasons. My only regret is that my flat contains a few items of undeniable good taste – both twentieth-century art and ancient chinoiserie. I would like to share these objects with similarly appreciative minds, but it is my experience that such sensitivities are hard to find, even in a cultured city like my own. Finally and most treacherous of all, our fingertips exude nasty, acidic oils that cling to every surface we touch. We are a creative species, but are betrayed by our own hands that methodically set about destroying everything we make. Unlike the lucky man whose touch turned everything to gold, our hands can make gold disappear. It could be said that my fingertips are consuming the flat while the rest of me is having to pay not only the huge mortgage but also the bill for the damage they cause.
Can the Gods Cry? Page 5