Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

Mother apparently quite well understood what was going on in this strange aesthetical puberty. She looked evenly into my half-closed eyes, then took me by the hand and led me down to the Mze. “If you don’t lie, you don’t have to remember what you say,” she said earnestly. Then she pushed my face close to the water, incanting,

Come and wet us waters

Look up, look down,

May as much come into the eye

As came out, and

May it now perish

Using her large hands as a pail, one leg in the river and one on shore, my indispensable Naiadish companion wet me down until I was dripping from head to foot, and with her thumb washed out my mouth. Then she said something rather extraordinary: “If you cannot be truthful, then at least be deep.”

“Oh, girl!” the river groaned. Swallows dove like raptors into the yellow foam, and at each plunge a ruby droplet sprang forth. Fish leapt for dragonflies and mouthed them whole, settling back engorged and feline in the waters. And mayflies clotted corybantically above the feeding ground in singing flight, kissing each other in milliseconds without consolation, insensate. I knew I had in me the blood of the Peraperduga, those naked young girls who in times of drought were set in motion by the Astingi from village to village, where libations of wine and water were poured over their heads, and they would dance, shivering from joy, until the rains came. But I dried quickly, like a horse.

Then Ainoha made a garland of poppies and put it round my head, threw sticks and herbs into the river, and gave me a stone to bite. Her lingering touch was like a cigar burn. The sun was hot, the pines smelled sweet, and on the hills the last pearbloom was scattering. She made a garland of poplar blossoms for her hair, and pinned a corsage of tongue-shaped sorrel on the black ribbon of her belt. Her waist was so small a tiny child could reach his arms around it. Her deep bosom and sculpted shoulders, her fine rounded arms and slender wrists hung over me like stormclouds. Little ringlets of hair escaped from the pansies on her temples, droplets of sweat appeared in the small valley of her upper lip. Her eyes were the color of violets in the rain, a sweet companion to my bitter shoulder. But the more I acknowledged her beauty, the less mystery it aroused in me. More aware than ever of the weaponry of her appeal, I began to find it almost offensive. The voice had become a wail — not the weeping of a woman or child, but some old bloody hero howling, in the rush of three great rivers roaring as they flow, a propitiation to her spell.

Her mortal eye, my mortal eye,

Our mortal hands

Silent angel, write silence

In my hands,

Alleilu

The me that wasn’t speaking was the Wodna Mze , my Waterman, the spirit I would come to lean on as no other. He was the one who gathered Ainoha’s combings from the river, and sewing them together with bark and fungus, made a cradle for her Fire Child. As usual, the Mze gave no reflection even in its most serene calm. But sitting on the river floor amidst toppled rotting stumps, I spied my miserable Waterman asorrowing, howling for the flower on the bank who inclines her head to listen to the powers of the water. For no one has ever escaped love, or ever will, as long as there is beauty in the eye to see with.

Ainoha kept singing her countercharms and kept pouring water over me, laughing all the while. A gust of wind had flattened her skirt about her belly, accentuating the soft outlines of her bivalved Venus, the only trace of the eternal ocean in our part of the world. The reed-beds nodded their gray-green heads in the breeze as the bullrushes rasped. I knew that to leave this world I must pass through her gate.

I bit on the stone. Despite her placations and invocations, I would not be disenchanted. I refused to put my face into the waters. I objected to being purified or rescued. I would not fall into her arms. Nor would I lose myself in her loosened hair, for a real goddess occasionally prefers resistance to appeasement. She knew I loved something before her, something already dissolved in the very water in which my embryo floated. I stood shivering from head to toe, well into dusk.

Finally, gathering up her skirts, Ainoha stood up and put her hands on her hips, her slender shape blocking out chaos. The pansies were wilting on her noble brow, and owls with their great miner’s lamps of eyes flapped upriver to mine the falling darkness.

“Very well,” she said with winsome exasperation, “you are a brave boy. And for that I shall love you forever.”

Flat as a fish, entrusting myself to her faith, but leaning on my Waterman, I turned Leviathan and escaped beneath the earth into those vast realms far beyond the night.

It was a solemn evening of impressive adult talk, and many crystal beakers of moon wine and Armagnac were emptied. Much of the conversation was above my head, though when the subject turned inevitably to Wolf, I realized they were speaking with the tact necessary for dealing with those more trouble than they were worth, a category in which I included myself and all the other helpless creatures in the world, and to which this handsome threesome had such an irrational attachment.

They spoke of themselves as gay soldiers and sober custodians waging a battle for Wolf ’s nihilistic soul. They would have preferred to run away from those responsibilities, I believe, perhaps to engage in one of those primitive rituals wherein all ties and taboos are thrown off for a fortnight, men and women anonymously and cheerfully betraying each other in a dark forest. It was only their contempt for the weakness of the majority which kept them from running off. They all admitted there were times when they wanted to take Wolf for a walk and shoot him cleanly through the base of the skull. Certainly that’s what the Astingi would have done. I blushed for their honesty. And I would never know whether I was meant to hear this or they simply had forgotten my presence.

They were not, as always, in total agreement as to strategy. The Professor now held to the view, as a result of his disastrous tentativeness, that while we cannot send force wherever our sensibilities are threatened, once committed we must pursue a policy of unconditional surrender.

My father took serious issue here — to terminate the illness, the ill cannot be threatened with liquidation, he argued, and in any case the burdens of total victory were impossible.

“The life of an animal such as Wolf is shaped by the incessant wait for aggression,” he said slowly. “He lives perpetually alert to the hunter, who most often does not even exist. The hunter is there in his life about as often as the tiger is in ours. The idea is not one of ethical perfection; it is only to persuade the beast that there is no Universal Hunter.”

Mother, picking up the lost sticks of the argument, brought things to a close:

“The only thing we can do, even if we cannot set a perfect example, is urge restraint as a matter of self-interest,” she said. “He will be less harmful to himself if he heeds our interpretation.”

This was brave talk, to be sure. I did not have the wit to realize then that I would come to my manhood in a time when all these strange notions of Passion and Honor, Authority and Discipline, Restraint and Guidance, were to be suddenly set aside, while every man and woman, child and parent, horse and dog, ran for the autonomous hills.

It was not clear whether the Professor had been disabused of his most cherished notions, or whether he was enervated by the meal. He simply sat, slouched as usual, playing with his fork.

Now Father, like all Cannonians, was a born raconteur, but he was sensitive enough to know that a conversation couleur ought not end like a courtroom drama, and so he moved to make a show of his vulnerability. In hindsight, it was perhaps a mistake to let the Professor off the floor.