Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

“All cast locally,” Iulus said, pinging the fine legs of each athlete as we passed, humming a local ditty, “ Wo ist der Negerstatue mit einer Schlanger in der Hand ?” (“Where Is the Negro Statue with the Snake in its Hand?”) I was very happy to be among this bric-a-brac, which appeared so happy to have me among them.

We passed a neoclassical rotunda without a name, apparently built simply to show off a rare whiterind fir tree, which had grown “naturally” into the shape of a lyre (only one of a number of dendrodological curiosities), and ultimately we strode across a series of low stone humpbacked bridges to the “Freemason’s Pavilion,” a roofless brick and stucco ruin with a blue slate cornice and windows in the shape of five and six pointed stars, surrounded by red beeches and Japanese maples. The stucco had been peeled away artfully from its exposed arches, framing broken Saracen columns and a severely but precisely damaged stairway to nowhere—“Just the sort of place,” my guide commented with his usual abstracted air, “where one might wander from time to time after dinner in the library, and find an unknown guest who might amplify a line of Dante you did not quite understand.” Then we meandered past a group of gnarled olive trees, enormously high, which still belonged to the same peasant family who had refused to sell to any of the former owners, and now towered above even the maples. Its fruit was still harvested by the same family, or rather picked up from the ground after the first winter winds, Iulus related proudly.

The final stop on our itinerary was his grandfather’s discovery — the source of the Mze. Less was known then about the peoples and gods who occupied the banks of this river than those of the Nile itself. The Mze dove, resurfaced, and redoubled upon itself so many times that it was only recently that people connected its parts. We were climbing the crest of a hill, by no means the highest locally, with the only unlandscaped meadow within the park, when we came upon an empty shack of no discernable function. It sat there in disillusioned clarity, with no nature around or behind it. Iulus pointed out a listing piece of gutter which fed a rain barrel, at the bottom of which a rusted spigot dribbled onto the ground, apparently the origin of four hundred and eighty miles of serpentine river basin. He pointed again to the collection point of the Hermes well and thence to the ponds, one roaring like an engine, the other still as a mote, then to the broken dam and its dry cascade, and finally to a bright, harmonious, and sweet-flowing stream which wound in its infancy to a sluice in the village, where it began to rage from human mismanagement — and shortly thereafter, outflanking and checkmating its own tributaries, confused and inundatory, simply dissolved. We had sunk to our boottops in the sodden grass. The dogs drank happily but appeared bored. Iulus waved us back to the house.

We had gone only a few hundred yards down the gentle incline when we came upon a huge mound of earth only recently thrown up.

“An Astingi warrior,” he explained, “no doubt of high rank. They bury them mounted on their horse, even if the horse is alive.”

“What happened?” I said in my smallest voice.

“Just another bloody and inconclusive struggle,” he shrugged, and then sighed gravely. “Any disclaimer for lost pasts is childish.”

But for me, no amount of ignorance or atrocity could take the magic out of Semper Vero, that compact universe of pure play, the promise of a life of singular details and no general upkeep, a life of the given . I was watching myself have an emotion which had no name. It wasn’t exactly love; I was happy in a different way. For the first time in my life I had a companion who I liked precisely because I knew I could never be like him. I was also losing the facility of my sincerity.

“You are looking at me with such interest,” he said, “that I hope you won’t become disappointed with me.”

On the terrace we cleaned our muddy boots with bayonets. Through the French doors I could make out nothing but vases of the largest flowers and portraits of the boldest nudes I had ever seen. He let the dogs in and they thudded immediately into a groaning goosedown sofa. He apologized for knowing so little of the history of his own home. This was neither a matter of secrecy nor deception, he insisted; his parents simply did not know nor care about its original functions. Then he offered me a chair on the terrace, sat down on his haunches like a hound, and as he began to talk, a large black crow with brilliant black plumage suddenly alighted on his shoulder.

“Semper Vero has been in my family for only one hundred years and it has been for sale for most of that time. When my mother’s adoptive father, Priam, inherited the property in the 1840s from a distant cousin, he ignored the architecture, eyes only for the fat warped open volume of the overgrown and undistinguished park. On trains, boats, and carts he brought in rare evergreens from all over the world to make an arboretum, the first devoted solely to that species in the Central Empires — as if what they needed in this vast mountain periphery, filled then with virgin forest, was more trees. This indigenous forest he indeed sold off, wood lot by wood lot, to buy rarer and rarer evergreen seedlings and specimen plantings from other destitute estates. In the buildings, including his own home, he took not the slightest interest. Architecture’s only reason for existence, in his mind, was to give some inanimate organizing texture to the landscaping. But there was not a vegetable shoot in Cannonia whose story he could not tell. I used to follow him on his walks, and when I couldn’t name a shrub, he encouraged me to make one up, and then had a copper nametag made for my little fiction. Perhaps it was a kind of holding action,” he murmured solemnly, “this passion for the evergreen, or perhaps a reaction to the desultory and wanton mining, his hatred for the veins of antimony, quartz, and garnets which had seduced even the Neanderthals. Not to mention his absolute loathing for cattle, which he would shoot without a qualm if they even so much as looked across the fence at a rare shrub.” The crow left his shoulder as peremptorily as it had arrived, but he gave no notice.

“But then one day, at fifty years of age, when the trees had reached a nice maturity, when the vistas had filled in nicely and all the children grown, Grandfather Priam got up suddenly from supper one evening, took his cape and cane, walked out on the terrace and down the drive. . and never returned. No one ever discovered what became of him — though there was a rumor of a pilgrimage to a church in the East. At the fullest measure of his life, he simply. . disappeared. . as if the genius of his place could only be preserved by his exile.”

He said this with a tone of surprise as if he had just heard it for the first time, and turning slightly pale, left the subject by motioning to me to follow him down the winding drive where his grandfather had abandoned his little empire.

The drive had been modestly constructed in such a way as to suggest there was nothing more than a vineyard shack or an abandoned quarry at its end, but I noted its every turning might be defended by a handful of lightly armed men. At each bend, mountain torrents dove beneath severe humpbacked stone bridges, wide enough only for a single cart. These, he mentioned, had been constructed in the thirteenth century for the visit of the Blind King, Agram, who had desired to construct a castle and taxing facility upon the heights. The King with his beautiful dead gaze had been led along the road by the local nobles, winding round and round the short volcano by the longest possible route, until at last the Blind King pronounced the vantage too high and abandoned his project, to general relief.