Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

But to be charitable, Catspaw’s temperament would have caused anxiety even to those with lesser nerve. He was religious in routine, philosophic in temperament, historical in nostalgia, and avant-garde by default, though lacking belief, analytic ability, knowledge of the past, or real ruthlessness. He blamed his anxieties on the “metaphysical condition of art,” and his moods on the paradoxes of “being itself.” And he often spoke wistfully of the “externalization of internalization.” In short, Catspaw operated solely in that elegant and apocalyptic space between the banal specific and all there is to be known. With superhuman effort, he had turned himself into one of those intellectuals from whom one often comes away from a conversation feeling actually deprived of knowledge. He was right as long as he was talking, but then the silence overwhelmed everything he had just said. All this was further complicated by the fact that his status in our household was unclear — not quite a servant, tutor, guest, jester, savant, relative, or even presence, but rather an up-to-date irritant — a walking, talking reality check, a case study against tolerance.

Nevertheless, Father took occasional pity on him, inviting him to our Zoopraxinoscope evenings, where Muybridge’s still photographs of animal locomotion were beamed successively upon the wall, Father noting how differently the horse uses its legs in the amble, canter, and gallop, and pointing out with dripping sarcasm how aesthetes — from Altamira cavemen to Leonardo to Gericault — had all painted horses running with all four hooves off the ground, getting the true locomotive posture completely wrong. These evenings always ended with a silent movie of Mother prancing along the diving board as if she were walking the plank.

“All our movements, like our feelings, are stiff, you see,” Father toasted the images. “We do not dash headlong through space. We do not move the way we feel we move,” he nodded sharply to Catspaw, “any more than we write the way we feel we think.”

And Mr. Catspaw could be seen later, with his long, prematurely gray hair and dirty cape, wandering the terrace in the moonlight, his upturned waxen profile lost in thought.

He would be my loyal life companion, batman, and object lesson. For while I felt closer to a cab-horse than an intellectual, no man could ask more from a tutor — one who will try on every up-to-date fashion, regurgitate in your stead the countless mass of new thoughts, so that a boy might cultivate his ideophobia, resist every metaphysical titillation, as well as every stupefying compulsory opinion. In Cannonia, to have a fool attending on you is a mark of great distinction.

The first thing one noticed about Seth Silvius Gubik was his ability to masturbate with either hand. (He could roll each eye independently as well.) This perfect ambidexterity was extended to drawing (he could simultaneously draw double helixes spiraling away from one another), athletics (he could skip stones with either hand across the widest parts of the Mze), and even the keyboard, where he could perform an anonymous canon of his own composition from two separate sheets of music, the left hand playing a tune beginning with the last note, and the right ending with its first note, recte et retro, alla riversa in the Hebrew manner. He could Germanize the weak and pleasant action of a French piano with a Brahmsian sonority, and with Viennese instruments of delicate touch and bouncing, rolling action he could maintain nuance while adding volume and restless French chromaticism. If no instrument was available, he would beat out a fugue on a log with his knuckles based on the letters of his name. He liked anything in C-minor, and he played with a seriousness which suggested that a new version of the piano would eventually have to be constructed for him. “There’s no use in being envious,” Father said, “it is given to some and not others.” Mother sniffed, “Warm hands, cold heart.”

Gubik’s hands were neither slender nor large; indeed, his fingers were so thick he had trouble fitting them between the black keys. Yet he could not only reach a twelfth but play chords without arpeggiation. His fingers somehow moved independently of each other, so he could play a Bach fugue with three fingers of each hand, and with all ten invisibly bring out any individual note from a block chord. His perfectly split brain thought of his two hands as one, so the sound was of three. He played impassively with his fingers flat; occasionally his wrists dropped below the level of the keyboard. The motion of his hands was always legible , as if they were moving in sign language. He sat very low on the stool, and always concluded with a single unsmiling bow.

With such amazing reflexes, it was no wonder that Father preferred him to me, though he did his best not to show it. He was torn between sending him to a conservatory, which he feared would debase his natural talent, and preserving his remarkably intuitive nature at Semper Vero at the cost of condemning him to a life of near servitude.

Gubik was then almost my age but not exactly my friend, and one tolerated him as one tolerates a genius who is always potentially going to throw things out of balance. If one were interested in symmetry, one would have to say that he was everything Catspaw wasn’t, for if Catspaw was always one step from self-destruction and oblivion, Gubik was always in the wings, ready to step forward as a total presence. Apart from his uncommon aesthetic abilities, it might be said that he absorbed and fed off every scrap of authority that Catspaw squandered, a perfect reverse mime. He was his own school, a true original, a boy willing to grab hold of history, make it conform, and kiss every hand he could not bite. He taught me that the hardest thing in painting is to draw a perfect circle, and the only way to do this is to draw two circles simultaneously with both hands, so that concentration and self-consciousness cancel one another out, allowing the form to perfect itself. This was of course the secret to his approach to the keyboard, and later, politics, where he discovered how to play the feminine masses. (As Commissar for Cults and Education, his lieutenants noticed that he could write a chatty personal letter with his right hand while drafting a government document with his left, or hold a telephone conversation while penciling in sardonic asides on some proposal.) Unfortunately, he became interested in the sort of repertoire which suits the performer more than the listener. With his sad, gentle face, he was precisely the sort of man a poor wretch would seek mercy from, and the very last man who would grant it.

Gubik was allegedly the illegitimate issue of a deaf and dumb Astingi maiden and a long gone soldier billeted in Silbürsmerze, incurring both the enmity of her tribe as well as the indifference of the local population. Mother had taken her in, given her rooms over the stable, an easy regimen in the house, and had even acted as her midwife — all the more remarkable since Gubik came into the world only a month after myself.

He was good with animals, all animals, and took to his role as a kind of elevated swineherd, carrying a crook sharpened at the edges like a scythe, diffidently picking up the prized long-haired Mongolian pigs from each village house at dawn, and escorting them to engorge themselves on the fallen fruits and nuts of the forest, supplemented with a mash of beetroot, bird’s eggs, and trout. At dusk they would return in single military file, until each belled pig had turned in at its own gate. For pocket money he would join the gruff and dirty choruses of those who dragged boats upstream, though he did not take well to authority and had a highly developed sense of injustice. Mother once said that he would “not be happy until every king was strangled in the lap of every disembowled priest, every dwarf stretched out, and every beggar enriched.” When he returned downriver, he would go to the empty church to practice on the echo organ, playing with his rope-burned hands behind his back his own renditions of “The Flight of the Bumblebee” or “Ah! Perfido” holding double-thirds or even full octaves in both hands. Opening the full Rückpositiv and Brustwerk pipes, he drew uncomfortable tremolos from a duplex of the vox angelica and vox humana.