Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

Suddenly the pointer twitched all over the map from the Jutland Peninsula and southern Sweden to the Bay of Kent, swiping across Gaul to the Pyrenees, and then with a flash across Spain and the Mediterranean Sea, on to Carthage and Sicily.

“All this in a single generation! An undeveloped, swinish people? A rude, forest hatchet people who had somehow acquired a naval fleet? Well, there you have it! Thus speaks the stone.”

Father’s shirt was soaked with sweat.

“But surely there was a motive, an idea,” the Professor calmly interjected, “a dream, a fantasy, a belief that welded such disparate folk?”

Father cut him short. “Nothing of the sort. Ideas have their origin in explaining to your family why you have to move again. They simply took aim at the only coherent target, those peacock strutters on their pathetic walls, wrapped in their pastel winding sheets affixed with unattractive brooches.”

The Professor paused with infinite sarcasm. “Every dog will have its day, I suppose. And yet,” he continued more softly, “there were ancient wonders.”

“Ah, the old German dreaming of the sunken empire,” Felix rasped.

“No,” the Professor protested gently. “I was thinking of the Egyptians.”

“Fifteen centuries to determine that the dog is more venerable than the cat? A plodding people.”

“You are too hard on Aurelius,” the Professor went on, adopting a plaintive tone. “Have you no pity for one who prayed and worried for his men, who in turn only wished him gone? He was not superstitious; he was lenient. He was. . a gentleman.”

“He was only the first of men,” Father huffed, “who would force us to be intellectuals and take away our pastimes and pleasures!”

The Professor had spat out the marble, and it lay on the table in a small glistening pool of saliva. Father took no notice. He was scribbling down what he just said in furiant. And then I realized that this harangue was not rehearsed or calculated at all, but a desperate attempt, through the pretext of a debate, to recover the lost pages of his manuscript, not unlike Gubik deciphering his narratives from his mute mother’s sign language. Thus ended my aristocratic education. I had learned everything I needed to know for my career. For life with friends and lovers is essentially this: that we assist each other in recovering and rewriting the book which is always blowing away, when the words don’t mean what you say. If one is attentive to this in another, you may be idealized or hated, but you will never have to spy. If you are unlucky enough not to find such an accomplice, or sufficiently torpid to refuse to be one, we go to war. We go to war not only to save face, but because we are deliriously happy and relieved to set aside the incredibly demanding project of rewriting the lost book which is always being written. In our hyperacute consciousness we will seek the help of the barbarian, will urge him to come and deliver us from our final agony of revision, and burn the bloody library. Only Count Zich, it seems, was aware that we were in such a moment.

The Professor, putting his feet upon the table, resorted to the one name which he knew would get a response.

“I believe you neglected the bourgeois part of the story,” he said without a trace of conviction.

This slight remonstrance indeed gave Father second wind, allowing him to play his trump, literally, and the dogs and I shuddered as he approached the huge instrument which took up the end of the library, half-tank, half-lyre. He saw that he had the Professor half-persuaded, and knew that to bring the old dog finally around, to fix the new trick in the netherfolds of his cortex, he would have to demonstrate that his own diagnostic powers were yoked to compassion — this by reinforcing his subject’s weakest sense, in this case, the Professor’s lack of an ear, his natural tone deafness, worsened no doubt by years of fake listening. He managed one of those compact turns, spinning on his boot heel, always the prelude to putting his nose through the facts, and with this he seated himself at the instrument of black Cannonian pine, nine feet tall, built as a right pyramid, with a single unblinking Masonic eye carved at the garlanded apex, the keyboards held up by twin little negroid figures, one carrying bells and the other a sort of drum.

His little finger rose and struck a single note— boing, boink —and the Professor’s face lifted up as if an invisible training whistle had sounded.

“ This is what Marcus heard, Professor, beyond the voices and the taunts: boink. This is when he knew there was some magic boisterousness going on in those transalpine bastions which had to be constrained. Boink came the monotone, a note with his name on it, floating across the misty swamps and reedy islands of our melancholy region, the sound of reality, Professor, which Marcus mistook for the sound of attack.”

Father’s hands rose up to strike a chord from the huge furnace.

“Most prized of all, Professor, our people had in their wagons a rude wooden box or gourd across which was stretched a single string. Crude by Marcus’s melodious standards, perhaps, but let us never forget what stupefaction must have resulted from several millennia of the harp, relieved only by an occasional blast of the royal guards’ marine trombones — much less their callow attempts at choral harmony, which could be nearly pleasing only if chanted very slowly and with the utmost gravity. Against this officious flatulence, our tribes advanced with their crude dulcimers, their monochords, holding in their heads certain passages, something in E-flat perhaps, without a slightest notion of how they might be performed. But they knew one thing, which had not occurred to the routinized wizards of Rome, a discovery equivalent to fire and undoubtedly just as inadvertent. . That great day when a javelin toppled over upon a gourd, and our predecessors realized that a note might be struck as well as plucked, plonked and plinked as well as bowed and swiped, smited more than strummed, iron on the wire of history. . Yes, Professor, our people, the percussionists! Strike the string and turn Marcus white sitting in his dark tent. Watch carefully as those clear-eyed, clean toga’d men with their souls floating like little balloons above their head, will turn. . When from across the Mze they heard the first modern sound— boing —throwing fear into the slender ghostly voices of the homogeneous lyre, calling into question all constitutional guarantees, natural rights, and the niceties of law— boing ! And as they advanced, they learned quickly through victorious campaign after campaign, and not a few strategic retreats, that the other hand on the string might alter the tones. Wielding the spear through the Cannonian countryside, it was above Razacanum as forty-three churches were consumed in flames, that it was first announced that the thumb was no longer an apologetic pivot, a subordinate, but equal to the other four fingers, and there assumed a lead over the other fingers it would never relinquish. By expert force, we could diminish the sound, hold the note, fictitiously enlarge the span of the hand, while you went on with the next area of business. All great musical cultures are military, Professor, and as the great Robert E. Lee once said, ‘You can’t have an army without music.’”

Father raised his hands once again, though he had not yet struck a chord.

As Father detailed the wholesome reforms of our Astingi predecessors, admittedly transmitted forcibly for a time, I could not but reflect on their long march to the true imperium of the piano, and the brief time of my youth when all experience, technical and emotional, had been transcribed for it.

The original instrument in question had been purchased from a Turkish pasha by my grandfather Priam as a focal point for his sad, overstuffed furniture, which had nothing to do but face the fire. It served for a brief time as the national instrument of Cannonia, constructed as it was into two small pianos severed from their keyboards, so that they might be slung over donkeys and transported to concerts in the mountains. They were strung so they could be played inside with sticks by peasants, or outside if connected with the keyboard for those whose brain hemispheres happened to work together. Eventually the two halves were wedded with an innovative iron frame which insured consistently unequal tension, allowing the instrument, by separating wood from metal, to come as close as possible to the timbre of the singing voice, the illusion of the vocal.