Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

“It’s thirty years since I’ve tried this,” he said as softly as he would to a bride, and the mellow liquid topaz dissolved every grain of stubbornness and despair. The vintage issued from a pebbly ridge which produced four barrels a year of Charbah Negra, the most fickle and misunderstood of the great reds, a tart, cloudy, whimsical wine, with a burnt foretaste of iodine, and after a swallow, a scent of rose.

“Well, other bonds were stronger,” Father continued, after the despairing Professor had confessed his latest defeat. “Wolf is no great loss. He was not much, after all. Why can’t we just say, He forgot you, so you forget him!”

They drank long draughts of the sweet, apricot-colored essence, and heard the horses tremble the rafters overhead.

“They grieve with you, my dear friend, they tramp from the injustice of it all.”

My father’s interest in horses had waned since his youth, as he came to appreciate basic transportation over the expense of crazed beauties, and following the principle that a piano must strive to imitate the singing voice and vice versa, he began to search for a breed of horse whose temperament most resembled the dog’s. It was not long afterward that, while searching in a northern tier of counties where Grandfather Priam had hunted specimen shrubs, he located on the estate of a distant eccentric cousin of Count Zich descendants of the pure Pryzalawski tarpon horse, which in its migration with the Astingi had turned right at the Dukla Pass and kept its merriment and strength in the cold and desolate north, while the rest of the species herded blindly for the Arab Mediterranean to become romantic, slenderankled hysterics, fit for nothing except the mafia and girls’ scrapbooks. These northern animals could both haul and canter, take the family to church and plough, and between jobs negotiate the sharpest ridges at a brisk tolta , smooth as butter with a lonely rider lost in thought. They required no maintenance whatsoever, disdaining both the stable and the feed trough, and stood out in the fiercest blizzards in their shaggy golden coats, pawing through the snow for lichen. What they lacked in beauty — at times they appeared like enormous ponies, all neck, chest, and bulging joints, not well made at all — they more than made up for with stamina. I never saw one stumble, even when it was starving. Needing neither grooming nor shodding, they rolled in the pastures like great thunderclouds to burnish their coats, swam regularly in the strongest currents of the Mze, and trimmed their hooves by clog dancing along rocky escarpments. Only late in life did I realize that as the weather cooled and their coats grew shaggy, they appeared in the distance the exact color and texture of my mother’s pudenda.

Their only fault was proneness to obesity in lush pastures, and loneliness when not quartered with those of their own kind and disposition. They were sociable to an amazing extent, leaning upon one another in concert and pulling burrs from each other’s coarse manes with their teeth. They would carry a cringing child, a litter of kittens, or the most dyspeptic woman, and immediately know the difference. They refused, in a sense, to be kept, yet flight was unknown to them. Too good to be true, they would only run toward you . When the Chetvorah barked and lunged at them, they simply waited until the pack got too close, then sent them tumbling with their noses. The Astingi refused to sell even a one. They kept their older mounts long past service, in separate mountain pastures, where they often lived to the half-century mark. And when they died they were buried where they fell, in slightly convex mounds which mirrored the arch of their necks, memorialized with the sharp stones they had always avoided. Not surprisingly, in Cannonia (where it is rightly said that nothing can be done without a count) it was only through the intervention of Moritz Zich that we were able to acquire a brace and allowed to breed. I believe it was their blond presence in the fields about Semper Vero which prevented the Astingi from massacring us when the world turned over.

The drink had had no effect on the Professor’s despondency, though a new map of veins appeared on his nose, and Father led him up the cellar stairs, saying only, “Let me show you something.” There a stallion the color of clotted cream, with a black dorsal stripe, stood in the half-lit stall, a full wagon harness slung like a great indecipherable web upon him. The horse regarded my father calmly as always, for he was as sweet as he was strong. Father only had to reach out and touch the harness for Moccus to shiver with what was clearly delight.

“You see how much he loves it?” Felix said. “Fifty-three years old and still a stud! He loves to haul — the more the better. It’s his freedom, you see. His calling, one might say.” Then he placed the Professor’s hand on Moccus’s flank and the horse began to haul in the stall, as if exercising the concept of burden. His enormous weight creaked the timbers of the stable, and we all took up the shiver of delight.

“Feel it?” Father said. “He’s giving it back to you. Just as with Wolf. Except with Wolf, it was all anger and affectation.”

The Professor’s mind was now on display. I could feel the intellectual machinery encountering the unprovable, converting it into an idea he could grasp.

“It’s bred in him, I suppose,” he said skeptically, “but I’ve never trusted horses.”

Father stared at him. “Some were born to pull at the traces, of course. But the only question is this: what is the message you are sending him ? Your touch is quite tentative, and yet he is encouraged!”

“ You are saying that I am communicating my skepticism, but I say I cannot help it.”

“Of course, my friend. We ought to encourage skepticism. But there is a huge difference between skepticism and distrust. Intellectuals hardly ever know the difference, in my experience.”

“Yes, yes,” the Professor murmured in a series of rapid shrugs, as if to deflect the argument like a whirring peach moth. “We always forget the ancient brain.”

My father started as if he had been whipped, then broke into that long, low laugh of his.

“Surely,” he sputtered, “surely you do not place full faith”—he was choking with mirth at this point—“with the poet of the Galapagos?”

The Professor blanched as if from a wound.

“It’s the most convincing explanation we have.”

“Balderdash. Only the latest propaganda which everyone parrots and no one reads. The paraphrase, Herr Doktor, enforced in school by drones. Ah, yes, I can recall it now: the mural of the ape as he gradually draws himself erect, losing a bit of hair at each stage of his receding slump, the illusion of progress. A schoolboy’s fantasy, Doctor. So reassuring. Well, it’s as crude as the cartoons of the Kaiser with blood on his hands. Is that what gets you promoted at university these days?”

The Professor did not reply, and Felix could see that he had unwittingly touched a sore spot. He could flush out an unreflective premise like a good dog tracks a wounded bird, and then, while deciding whether the poor, maimed thing deserves a point, look back over his shoulder apologetically.

“I mean, it’s all well and good to say we got it from our ancestors,” Father continued softly, “but then where did our ancestors get it? How did the crocodile acquire a vagina? Survival is easy enough to explain. But how do you explain the arrival of the fittest, eh? There is simply no reason at all why we should exist as a species!”

“Hold on there,” the Professor stammered, as if to change the subject. “Does he not appear to be crying?”

And it was true: several large globules, shining like crystal, were making their way down Moccus’s golden nose.