Square Wave

by Mark de Silva

  The letters were carried back home mostly on English and Dutch trader ships, sometimes light military vessels. They were taken first to the Ceylonese ports on foot—Colombo, Manaar, Trincomalee, and Jaffna—by Dutch messengers, Arab traders, and French explorers. Rutland had sneaked many of them to Sinhalese villagers he’d befriended over the years of captivity, years correlating precisely with the Bubonic plague’s sweep through Europe. Captivity by God’s grace, he would write later. Taking pity on him, the Sinhalese would find ways to get his letters into the right hands when he himself could not.

  The letters were generally five or six pages, written on a local paper, not palm, that was pressed by the Dutch. It was made from coarse plant fibers that flecked the cream of the paper with gray, black, and green. The imperfections distorted Rutland’s wide script, which he’d applied in a heavy ink with the feathers of those red cocks native to the island. His line jittered, being pushed to one side or the other by the topography of the pulp. His mind might have jittered too.

  Each sheet was housed in polythene now, and stacks of them sat all around Stagg’s apartment. Most were in good shape, not only because of the efforts of various Rutlands over the centuries, but because the coarse pulp was naturally low in acid. A more refined stock might have been dust by now

  They circled around just a few issues: the resolution of business matters back in England, with his father; how the affairs of his house should be handled in his absence; and, most important for Stagg, what his life was like in Ceylon, offered through small sharp glimpses of the island, as if they, more than anything more systematic Rutland might say, could most effectively close the distance between them.

  Rarely were they explicit about the depth of his anxiety. Yet the only feelings he omitted were the ones he had about himself. His affection for his wife, father, and close friends was everywhere in evidence, always in the tone, and sometimes in closing paragraphs and postscripts, where he would describe an experience common to their lives he was particularly fond of, the contemplation of which now brought him pleasure.

  Anxiety and despair, these were reserved for the journals, though even his lamentations were crosscut with precise physical description. Stagg had so far located only six of these books, in palm paper. Their pages tell that more were composed, probably too many to carry through the mangroves of Manaar in the escape.

  That he carried any at all is a surprise. They were thick volumes, together weighing some twenty pounds. They would have compromised his chances of escape by some margin. But, Rutland writes, leaving without the journals would be like leaving twenty years behind, mercurial ones, and in all likelihood, he recognized even then, the most interesting ones, if also the most difficult, he would ever live. He’d kept them at the bottom of his rucksack on the escape through the midland swamps, not allowing Knox to know he hadn’t left them behind, as Knox had left his own.

  Knox’s Historical Relation was composed mostly from memory back in London. So, for all its texture, it had to be more abstract than Rutland’s contemporaneous chronicle. (It was unclear when Haas’s records were composed, or even how exactly they’d made their way to the Austrian library Stagg had found them in.) The density of detail in Rutland’s unpublished writings easily outstripped Knox’s work, whether about village architecture, the structure of the court, flora and fauna, hunting techniques, or trade with the Europeans.

  Where events appeared in both accounts, how could Rutland’s not be given more weight? His words, after all, were temporally closer to the objects and events described, and conceptually closer as well, perhaps, in that Rutland gives us scenes, sequences of his experience, inner and outer, unfolding in ordinary time. Knox condenses and generalizes from his. Supposing their powers of observation were commensurate, and that neither had more reason than the other to distort matters, it seemed natural to give priority to Rutland’s words.

  But the first assumption: How to measure their perceptual acuity without being, yourself, in a position to check it against your own, observing the same things, beyond the correspondences with other documentary evidence? And did aesthetics insinuate itself here, as it did in mathematics? Perhaps it had a place, and the great maligned classicist Richard Bentley and his heterodox approach to interpretation—really his gifts as an exegete were beyond question—was right, to a point at least. A great aesthetic intuition could recover the true and fullest form of a gap-ridden text, even when it was Paradise Lost, and the world snorted with laughter at the emendations.

  There would also be immanent clues to consider. Too many inconsistencies in an account might suggest a weak eye. But too few might suggest the same, the missing of distinctions, of tensions, of the minute irreconcilability of events along their edge that every glassy text and tale polished away.

  Even if the matter of priority couldn’t be settled, an equilibrium might be sought. Rutland’s words could light Knox’s, and Knox’s Rutland’s. Similarly for the rest—the Chronicles, the trader balance sheets, Haas’s and Darasa’s words—until everything was bright, light dawning “gradually over the whole,” as he’d read once in the carrels of the Wren library, in Cambridge (Bentley’s library, too). The pages of that original manuscript, Wittgenstein’s, were tinged blue, he recalled, by the light falling through the library’s tall lead panes.

  In Berkeley, the preferred term was semantic holism: the fixing of the position of one term by the fixing of the position of others. Perhaps, then, Stagg’s work was just historiography as an extension of radical interpretation, recovering the past as one recovers the meaning of sounds leaving mouths, a world, an idiolect, on every tongue.

  Then the second assumption: Beyond reconstructing the life of a nation, to what extent could Knox’s private view of the Sinhalese be discovered? There were far fewer letters to go on. Apparently he didn’t think there was much hope of their reaching home.

  Rutland’s records, the journals and the letters, were private documents, which meant he would have had little reason to mold them for public effect. Historical Relation, on the other hand, was written to be widely read, and was.

  As one of the first Britons to be so deeply acquainted with South Asia, Knox offered one of the first detailed reports on the land; there is an early mention of cinnamon, for instance, and other endemic spices. So he might well have been tempted to sculpt his account, in an effort to shape the dawning imperial consciousness of a nation. The irony being, though, that through the influence of his family through the generations, Rutland’s account almost certainly had a deeper effect on that consciousness than Knox’s in the long run.

  Knox more than Rutland took an impersonal, quasi-anthropological approach, and this suppression of subjectivity created a further hurdle for Stagg. Knox was steeped for twenty years in the country’s atmosphere before writing the book, though. Whatever his aspirations toward being a dispassionate witness, time would have molded his sensibilities, structured his account.

  But teasing out the normativity, uncovering the moral architecture of the book, and of the British Empire—all the things that interested Kames—how was that to be done with Historical Relation? The book rarely engaged with matters in a straightforwardly moral way, so Stagg would have to detect their subtextual operation. And then, as before, how far could the moral framework be prized apart from the reality it framed? A kind of notional separation of scheme and content, to whatever degree it could be effected, was required, a double interpretation, of Knox’s consciousness and of the world it embraced.

  All this made him grateful for the private jottings of his ancestors.

  19

  Stagg mounted the subway steps near carrell Square, his ears still throbbing from the train. Only some lines had it, the crushing squeal that came on far from any platform, deep in the tunnels. Every conversation halted, and the sound, like a jet engine overlain with trebly polyphonic squawks, made itself the lone object of the car’s attention. It might have sprung from the tracks, he thought, something warped
or worn in the black spaces between stops.

  A wall of wind met him at the top of the steps. His stomach, rekindled half an hour ago by a swig of vodka as he walked out of his apartment, burned pleasantly. Still, he was feeling prickles and running with sweat, so he welcomed the frigid wind, which numbed and dried him. It was hard to outrun a chronic hangover. Whatever you did, however much you drank, it was right behind you, waiting for you to fall off the pace.

  The grinding noise grew rather than faded as he walked away from the station. A tower of scaffolding stood in the distance, in the square. Though it was partly lighted along its edges, it was still too dark, and there were too many crossbeams blocking his view, to see exactly what it scaffolded. He wondered whether work somehow might be going on, even so late. The sound only got louder as he walked, before suddenly falling away.

  The fountain in the square was dry, and under the dim construction lights circling it, the concrete was pitted and scaly. Plaster stained the bottom in swirls, especially near the base of the statue. It had been annihilated in a blast that came right on the heels of the one in Brandt Square, just weeks before. He’d assumed the statue at its center would be replaced, as the Brandt fountain was going to be, not restored. Circumstances must be different.

  He jumped the massive lip of the fountain and approached the statue. Plaster, or some sort of binder, was spattered along the fissure beneath the ribcage, where a curving chunk of the torso had been reset. The same had been done to one of the arms, though the hand, which was meant to rest on its waist, was still an absence. The wrist simply hung in the air, falling short of the body. He studied the legs, veined in hairlines as if a severe compound fracture had been set. A few slivers had been replaced by closely matched marble, perhaps quarried from the same mountain in Carrara, though it was a touch lighter, more translucent. It would have to age.

  The closer he came, the more fissures appeared. Touching the arm, he could see that the entire statue had been remade from hundreds of distinct chunks of marble, some original, some new, put together like a puzzle.

  The plaque, which he’d never thought to inspect before, read thus: “A Gift of Benjamin Henkel Jr. (1835-1870).” The Henkels must still be rich, Stagg thought, to have the wherewithal to put this back together or the clout to have the city council do it at its own expense.

  How many pieces was the head in? And when the restoration was finished, would it carry a new aesthetic valence? Restored works, after all, always bore the trace of that labor, even if only an expert could say in exactly which details it resided.

  The long bulbs attached to the beams around the statue streaked the blue-white marble with light and gave it an uncertain presence. Standing back from it, looking only upon its lower half, which was almost complete now except in its finest details, the fractures seemed to bring a kind of weight to the sculpture he’d not noticed before.

  On late afternoons turning into night, as an undergraduate in the city he used to sit on the benches circling the fountain, reading Sidgwick or Hobbes, even Grote, under the statue’s growing shadow. He felt he knew it better by that shadow, in fact, than by direct sight. The piece had never stirred anything in him, so he’d spent hardly any time face to face with it: the eyes long and drawn and faraway, the chin short and wide, the pose languid. All the interest, for Stagg at least, was shunted into one feature: the head’s being turned off to one side, as if something had sounded in the distance.

  Only this marble man’s destruction, and his ongoing reconstitution, had given Stagg a reason to consider him properly, to scrutinize him as a whole, in his own right, and not merely as an element of the square. The chance to study his lines, his translucent skin, at this distance, standing within the now-dry fountain, all of this depended on his having been exploded.

  He considered whether the original could truly be made to reappear, whether an entropic event could be run in reverse, an object unexploded. The viewer’s eye measured the conglomeration of marble shards, their discrete totality, against this ideal, of a statue hewn from a single slab, which Stagg seemed to grasp more fully now, in memory, than he had on any of the occasions he confronted the original in experience; those times he had stood in front of it, then sat under it, sometimes looking across the fountain, over his shoulder, as the statue itself did, though his mind was still mulling the books, seeking in them too discrete totalities, parts and wholes.

  A sound. This time not a squealing but an effervescing of notes, rising, ringing, locking together in unfamiliar combinations, not clashing exactly, but making the ears skeptical. If the tones didn’t keep coming that way, and if he didn’t hear the rhythm section enter, he would have assumed a mistake. There was a kind of absolute strangeness to it, or something just short of that. The work of an undiscovered culture maybe.

  Stagg drifted toward the tones, not yet ready to call them music. He’d come out, at Renna’s request, to see Larent and his new band, which this must be. But he was still thinking of the statue. The legs alone, in their rough state, seemed already to carry a charge different from the one he recalled, one that, no matter how exacting a job was done, he thought, could never be brought entirely into line with the original’s. But if the shifting by millimeters here and there; the discreet interpolation of foreign marble; the glues and plasters used to hold the exploded materials together as one; and the various hairlines that would invariably remain; if all of this altered the tone of the original, why must that be a shortcoming?

  The new valence, he thought, must make a more complicated impression, and for that it might well have greater heft. Doubtless the original had to guide the reconstruction. That didn’t mean it was any measure of the finished piece. As objects of art, they were two and not one.

  ■■■

  Through the scarred doors of The Round, then, and into a welter twice over, bodies and pitches teeming. The music—it was music now—had filled out. The crowd, mostly clutching drinks, appeared a congealed mass, lacking the moving parts that might make for passage through to the back, where Larent was performing, and Renna was listening, raptly, he assumed.

  The short leg of the L-shaped bar, facing out onto the courtyard, was mostly vacant, as the people crowded into the long leg to see into the cubed space beyond. But the sonic whirl was enough for Stagg. He stood at the end of the short leg, near the window, with his hands on the bar. When the bartender came he simply pointed at a sign describing the well scotch for the night. It was cheap, and tasted it: thin, sour, vulgarly medicinal.

  The snack bowl overflowed with a house medley. Cheetos, Chex, Fritos, corn nuts, Lay’s, pretzel sticks, and probably some other things. Any one of these made a passable nibble, but the mix was perverse, possibly by design, as it was suitable only to those well past drunk. He’d had nothing to eat since morning, only champagne and vodka. He finished half the bowl in five handfuls, slowing the alcoholic nausea he knew to expect.

  Larent had moved on substantially from what Stagg had heard from him last, that night at the little café. Gone was the precision counterpoint. In its place, a diffuse harmony driven by piano and guitar: arpeggiated, key-revolving, and set in a strange motion. The progression seemed of indefinite length; or if it had a length, Stagg couldn’t mark it, no better than a tone row of Schoenberg’s. Structure was tacit, more felt than grasped. The percussion, mainly toms, bass, shimmering cymbals, surfaced in low rolling flourishes, barely fixing a rhythm, which was left to the contrabass—Larent’s, presumably. He bowed a stream of half notes, then dotted half notes. It was the tether the ear sought in the driftlessness, grounding the harmony.

  Gone, along with the counterpoint, was the ordinary diatonic scale itself. Or if not gone exactly, reformed. Except for the octave, the newly untempered notes had all been nudged up or down, so what remained was almost a diatonic scale, but not, a shadow.

  The corresponding chords were shadows too, seeming just off target to the ear, precisely displaced, which retarded their uptake. The result was a musi
c apprehended retrospectively, the chords’ well-formedness established, their musicality unlocked, only after they’d given way to others that raised puzzles of the same order. The ear had no rest, and the struggle wasn’t his alone. The faces along the corridor leading to the cube showed a blankness—furrows and squints self-consciously held in check—or else, imperfectly masking this, a prehensile quarter-smile attesting only to a knowledge unpossessed.

  Many registers above, a lofted figure, aptly skewed, glided above the harmony before drifting down to mingle with its pitches. Quickly it returned to those first heights and fell again, a dissolving line that varied with each descent, adjusting to the drones of the new key.

  Stagg cleared a second bowl of the mix. The powdered cheeses disagreed with the peat rot of the whiskey. He could feel a heat behind his eyes, the first trembles of his eyelids. The best of his night was already past. The sickness had caught him. He’d be both drunk and hungover the rest of the night, and the bowl would have played its part.

  The music thinned and the joints of the piece emerged. The chords clarified around their central intervals, the fifths and thirds and sixths. There was a sonorousness to them, foreign, ineffable. The music had a dual aspect, he thought, like a Necker cube. Heard one way, it was alien beyond exotic, a deformation. Heard another, there was a sort of primordial solidity to it, an exactitude that made the tempered diatonic scale seem not a rival but only a coarsened derivative. The more Stagg’s ears probed these pure intervals, the more this second aspect fixed itself. The sense of skew fell away; the factitious and the real switched places.

  The drums petered out with the guitar, leaving the keyboard and bass to negotiate a few more chords, then a few fifths, then a few unisons, on their way to Bb, the tonic, a traditional resolution to a maundering piece.