Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

Of course the unstable chemistry of my personality finally ignited. The match was my beautiful, good-hearted cousin Julie. My sexuality had been so compromised that for years she had been the focus of my fantasies. It is glaringly obvious, at this distance, why I would be attracted to a female family member who believed in equal rights for blacks and for an end to the Vietnam War, a passionate Jewish woman who felt protective toward me, who always looked past my precocious intelligence to the hidden lonely boy. I didn’t have that insight into my libido: I was mesmerized by the movement of her white breasts under her black leotards and the fall of her shimmering black hair down her firm back.

In 1968 Julie was a senior at Columbia University. She had joined SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), a left-wing organization which was, that very year, beginning its transformation from a non-violent anti — Vietnam War organization into what would eventually become the ill-fated terrorist splinter group, the Weather Underground. As late as 1968, Julie’s family and Bernie didn’t appreciate — nor did the rest of America — how serious those young demonstrators were about changing the basic structures of American life: eliminating institutionalized racism, capitalism and imperialism. Julie was still regarded by her family as a bright, good girl whose participation in peace marches, lack of makeup and torn jeans were merely symptoms of a harmless phase, the young adult equivalent of an adolescent girl’s fascination with horses.

[That analysis is not entirely wrong. The faith that society can be altered may flourish in middle and old age, but is far more likely to bloom in people with little experience; and the bravado required to take arms against the world’s greatest military power is easiest to find in the invulnerable delusions of youth. We are animals, although we expend so much effort convincing ourselves we aren’t, and the chemistry of explosive growth in adolescence, full maturity in the twenties and the rapidly accelerating decay of middle and old age are powerful tides that push and pull our supposedly objective brains from idealism to pessimism. Nevertheless, some revolutions succeed and others fail.]

That same year, my sixteenth, Uncle put me up for participation in a program at Columbia University created to nurture precocious math students. Dr. Raymond Jericho, a professor at Columbia, taking note of the historical fact that all great theoretical mathematicians had begun their breakthrough work while still adolescents and completed it by their early twenties, amassed a small fortune in grants to gather bright kids from the area, aiming to discover another Isaac Newton. We met on Friday nights and all day Saturdays at the university, so our regular schooling wouldn’t be disrupted. The Times did a piece about us on the first day we met, dubbing it the “genius program.” Even then the publicity struck me as a sign that Dr. Jericho didn’t have his priorities straight. I got into hot water with him immediately, because I told the Times reporter, when asked what my specialty was, that I was working on an equation for time travel. “Really?” the reporter began to scribble and moved toward me. “He’s kidding,” Dr. Jericho said and punished me by forbidding me to work with Yo-Yo Suki (who later did important work in chaos theory) on cracking the Beroni paradox.

“It’s too hard,” Jericho told us.

“But you said we’re geniuses,” Yo-Yo said with his now famous deadpan. In those days, it baffled everyone.

“You two shouldn’t be paired,” Jericho said. “I’ve studied your files and you’re too alike.”

Yo-Yo, a very short, plump and pale Japanese boy with thick glasses, looked up at me — a six-foot-tall Jewish-Spanish kid, and in the best shape of my life thanks to swimming and tennis. Yo-Yo finished his survey and said, “Congratulations Dr. Jericho, you’ve just rewritten genetics as we know it.”

We were an odd group of teenagers. That remark caused the room to laugh as hard as if we had been watching the Three Stooges and Mo had been decked with a two-by-four.

Our meetings began in January. By February, I was disheartened. It was the first chink in the armor of my image as the brightest student in America — an image that I believed was crucial to maintain my uncle’s love and to secure his money. Of course (and this made it worse) the flaw was visible at that time only to me. We were divided in groups of four and asked to solve mathematical mysteries. My partners weren’t the most brilliant (indeed, none of them distinguished themselves later in life, as did Yo-Yo and another boy, Stephan Gorecki) but it became apparent to me that although my partners were average for the group, they were much faster than I, both in calculation and in grasping theory. After four sessions, I had nothing to contribute to the group meetings, and it took hours upon hours of hard work between sessions for me to do the relatively routine homework on transitional proofs, proofs that had been discovered centuries ago. I knew I was seriously out of my depth when a student named Jerry Timmerman tossed an equation I had worked on for thirty hours back at me, commenting, “This is junk. If you’re not going to really work hard you shouldn’t be here. What did you do? Scribble this on the subway?”

My only pleasure in this genius training derived from the fact that Julie’s apartment — which she shared with two other seniors — was a block away and she had offered to put me up on Friday nights. My uncle agreed to that, probably because it left him free to be alone with his mistress in his Manhattan pied-à-terre. After the battering Friday evening sessions, I staggered, defeated and frightened, down the long hill on 116th Street to be greeted by these women, bra-less under their peasant blouses, sometimes padding naked to the bathroom late at night or early in the morning, passing my bed on the living room couch, the flash of their bleached breasts and shadowed vaginas all the more exciting because of their sleepy and unselfconscious presentation. The gap in age — I was sixteen, the women were twenty-one — was apparently enormous to them. At least, that was my interpretation of why they thought nothing of having breakfast beside me in panties, reaching for the orange juice so that their T-shirts billowed out to reveal a dark aureole or a pink one or other fascinating details: a beauty mark on the soft underside, unshaven armpits, nipples hard as rubber one week, soft and quizzical the next. On my fourth visit, Julie noticed me stare at her roommate Kathy’s dark mound, puffy and dark through her white panties. When Kathy left the room, I — erect and breathing hard — finally looked away to find Julie studying me. I had a terrible moment. I was sure, now that she knew I wasn’t a sexless innocent, she would deny me the pleasure of these overnights.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Julie commented.

“Who?” I answered brilliantly. I draped my right arm across my lap in case the shape of my ardent penis was discernible.

“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” Julie said casually. She stood up to return the milk or the coffee — who was paying attention to that? — and showed her own tight buttocks in red panties, not covered by the gray men’s tee she wore to bed. Julie’s breasts were the largest, pushing against the material; her nipples always seemed about to punch through. They greeted me as she turned back to add, “The body is beautiful, you know man?” imitating a flower child, only I didn’t know what she was mimicking.

[Feminist psychologists have rescued us from grave flaws in theory caused by male assumptions but one of their blind spots is a failure to understand — rather, empathize — with the quite extraordinary difference between the power of visual stimulus for the male, especially the adolescent and young adult male, as measured against female response. Every study conducted, no matter what the prejudice of its authors, has shown that, although women may be stimulated by pornography — especially if it is sensually and beautifully rendered — young men always are, even by a brief, cursory and crude exposure to nudity. Men are highly excited under all conditions, whether in considerable pain, whether their mood is depressed or elevated, whether their expectation is that actual sex is possible, probable or impossible and no matter whether the tantalizing form belongs to someone they know, don’t know, love, hate or fear. The only exceptions are catatonics or other males in extreme states of psychosis. Feminist dismay at this fact of nature too frequently turns to disgust, disguised as thought, or to outright denial. Some have gone as far as to maintain that male response to visual stimuli is a product of socialization, of women being viewed as property. Anyone who has been an eighteen-year-old man knows that conclusion is worse than a flawed perception, it’s dangerous ignorance. Men joke about the decline of sexual response after thirty, but the truth is that for most, it’s a relief. Nature has loosened her enthralling grip just enough to allow at least a semblance of dignified thoughtfulness when presented with the supposedly abstract beauty of the human body.]