Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

Indeed, it was I who was uncomfortable in this interview. In Cannonia, national characters tend to be purified: the German most German, the Russian most Russian, and the American most quintessentially American. The Lieutenant radiated a curious compound of incuriosity and perplexity, the helplessness of abstract benevolence. Indeed, it seemed to me that right before my eyes, this proud fellow, this Newton of sociology, so clean and contracepted in his knowledge, was losing the boundary between right and wrong, as his general decency could only be expressed as aggressive and self-righteous sanctimony. He tried to cloak this with a self-conscious insouciance and boyish charm, as well as the apparently sincere belief that the scientific revolution stood at his right shoulder with the debonair nonchalance of a sergeant-at-arms. But Iulus acknowledged his interlocutor with the same amused equanimity of the Astingi watching another dogfaced people ford their shallow stream. He asked only if he could bunk with his Astingi comrades in the compound, and this was assented to with a final Cantabrigian shrug, as a form was pushed across a desk for him to sign off. Iulus chortled to himself as the pen was poised, as if he had forgotten which future alias was now appropriate.

“You don’t even know what your real name is, do you?” the lieutenant barked with exasperation, and to this Iulus managed a perfectly defenseless, docile, democratic, American shrug, equal parts dissent and submission, as feckless as those he had witnessed among the boys when handing out the pups. He was surely a quick study. Then he took the fine fish out of his boot and laid it on the table.

We led the golden pony down to the compound at dusk, where I had a devil of a time explaining to Iulus the sign at the gate: “No horseplay.” A great normalcy seemed to pervade everything. The barbed wire was strung loose. Kites flew. No one was peering out. No one looked in. The Astingi women were allowed in groups under guard to go down and do their washing in the river. The American sentries, wearing only sidearms, aimlessly wandered the perimeter, as if they were on their way to school.

The Astingi had already knocked out the windows and disassembled the prefab barracks, covering the doors with colorful capes and shawls, festooning the gray walls with great loops of sausages and braids of garlic. Cooking fires had been lit. Lambs were slaughtered and spitted, kettles burbled, piglets were gutted and baked. Melons, eggplant, leeks; red, green, and yellow peppers appeared from nowhere. The Astingi men in long skirts and their women in pantaloons passed long clay pipes between them. Their children, almost naked, played with tiny puzzles or read large thick books on their backs while a seven-dog orchestra woofed their woodwinds. As Shakespeare cultists as well as woman cultists, the Astingi were already throwing up stage wings for an open-air performance.

As a disorderly mass of starlings buried the sun, blackheaded whimpering gulls by the thousands descended on the bluish mists of the Mze. Skylarks rose with a whir, herons gazed coquettishly toward the vanished sun, and imperturbable rooks stalked off to the woods for the night. Then the reed-beds erupted in a fortissimo of song-duels, an ambuscade of lovelorn yearning, a clangor of male wailing and wanting which silenced the chorus of victory and the manly arts of war.

Iulus hobbled the blond pony loosely with a thong of crimson patent leather. The pony yawned, and as the bones in his face cracked, Iulus softly intoned an Astingi chant for me. “‘He who hath not seen the bird-pastures of the Mze / hath nothing seen / the whole world drinks from our river / the eyes of the sea. And whomsoever drinks from her / bottomless mists longs to return.’ You see,” he concluded with closed eyes, “it’s impossible to talk even for half an hour without the Mze coming into the conversation. .” We embraced shyly and made plans for an early breakfast in the commissary. The war was over.

That night I dreamt our national bedtime story: begat by virtue, winning through virtue, earning the right to correct the world. . and woke up in the middle of it, feverish and despairing.

He never appeared at breakfast and inquiries in the compound produced only hyperbolic shrugs and gaptoothed, golden grins. That was the last time for many years that I would see the agent called Iulus face to face, though we would shadow each other throughout our lifetimes and into something of the next. His self-confounded, mutilated little country has never been far from my thoughts since that day. I have yet to shake her pomegranate mud from my boots.

I went back to my bunk to make out my report. First impressions are most important, but it would take the rest of my life to sort them out. There is an immense relief in the knowledge that one actually knows nothing — that one can savor experience for itself, not because you can act upon it. Though my brain had collided with a labelless world, never before or since have my emotions been so lucid or distinct. I had been touched at all points. My empathy was, for once, exact . I opened the plaid valise and the Gladstone, and amongst the crumpled papers of the latter was a leatherbound volume, Da Historae Astingae: An Internal Guide to the External Barbarian . Each page was written in a different color ink, separated with dried leaves and herbs, and the incomparable female aromas of Cannonia made me giddy. But the Z-box was gone.

While the Astingi mounted an off-the-wall production of Titus Andronicus , the earliest and bloodiest of Shakespeare’s histories, from the first scene (“Alarbus’ limbs are lopt, and entrails feed the sacrificing fire”) to the last (“Set him breast-deep in earth, and famish him”), while the title character lost twenty-one sons in battle and personally dispatched another on stage, I was a merry genius for a week. What greater joy than to write without having to revise! I detailed the flora, fauna, and spiritual furniture of Semper Vero, listing their strategic possibilities as our condominium in Terra XX, our pleasure seat in the barbarian lands. I prayed that my well-fed American buttonhead might be pasted in brief appearance in that custodial lineage of tragic golden faces. And at the same moment, I vowed to desert from that army of Americans who would swarm over the world with answers, learning nothing.

Yes, there is a coffin coming. But I cannot tell you now who was in it.

Father wrote every evening in his Historae Astingae: An Internal Guide to the External Barbarian , disguised as a “Guidebook for Travelers” in order to make a market for it. Working at top speed, he usually produced about one hundred and twenty sentences of impossible terseness per night. Behind his mahogany swivel chair there was a large table with sixteen chessboards that formed one huge board, lined with the standing pieces. The pieces stood there summer after summer, intermingling as time went on. I do not know with whom he played, nor what happened in the game. They may have served simply as paperweights. He explained the rules to me, but his attitude was that once I knew the rules, it was not necessary to play. The incomprehensibility of the game was apparently its most important feature.

Sometimes he permitted me to stay with him while he worked, provided I was absolutely silent. I sat next to him at the edge of the desk, with my slender wit and unmoved disposition, drawing convoluted schoolboy clouds as the books which surrounded us, interlocked and overlapped, flowed back and forth into one another like sea anemones or the Mze itself. And when he got up to consult a reference or simply to pace up and down, I stared at the folio next to me, its half-completed sentences looping away like a thin line of ponies on the horizon, inviting me to run down, ride them, pull hair from their manes.