Walker Percy - Lancelot

How can such dire and absolutely verifiable events follow upon the most insignificant of evidence?

In my case, the evidence was not the minute shift of a dot on a photographic plate but a letter on my desk. No, not a love letter; no, I mean a letter in the alphabet. The letter O . I’ll explain, if you’re interested. Christ, you don’t seem to be. Are you watching that girl I hear singing? I hear her every day. You know her, don’t you?

I’ve seen you speak to her on the levee. She’s lovely, isn’t she? Clean jeans, clean combed hair halfway down her back. She crosses the levee every day. I think she lives in one of the shacks on the batture. Probably a transient from the North, like one of the hundreds of goldfinches who blow in every October.

One becomes good at observing people after a year, like an old lady who has nothing better to do than peep through the blinds. I observed that you know her well. Are you in love with her?

Ah, that does surprise you, doesn’t it? Listen to the girl. She’s singing.

Freedom’s just another word, Lord, for nothing

left to lose

Freedom was all she left for me

Do you believe that? Maybe the girl and I come closer to believing it than you, even though you surrendered your freedom voluntarily and I didn’t. Maybe the girl knows more than either of us.

But we were speaking not of astronomical categories but rather of the sexual. A horse of another color, you might say. Well, yes and no. There are certain similarities. Compare the two discoveries. The astronomer sees a dot in the wrong place, makes a calculation, and infers the indisputable: comet on collision course, tidal waves, oceans rising, forests ablaze. The cuckold sees a single letter of the alphabet in the wrong place. From such insignificant evidence he can infer with at least as much certitude as the astronomer an equally incommensurate scene: his wife’s thighs spread, a cry, not recognizably hers, escaping her lips. The equivalent of the end of the world following upon the out-of-place dot is her ecstasy inferred from the O.

Beyond any doubt she was both beside herself and possessed by something, someone? Such considerations have led me to the conclusion that, contrary to the usual opinion, sex is not a category at all. It is not merely an item on a list of human needs like food, shelter, air, but is rather a unique ecstasy, ek-stasis, which is a kind of possession. Just as possession by Satan is not a category. You smile. You disagree? Are you then one of the new breed who believe that Satan is only a category, the category of evil?

Yet how can such portentous consequences be inferred from such trivial evidence? I will tell you if you wish to know, but first I want to report my own reaction to my discovery, which was, to say the least, the strangest of all. You would think, wouldn’t you, that the new cuckold would respond with the appropriate emotion — shock, shame, humiliation, sorrow, anger, hate, vengefulness, etc. Would you believe me when I tell you that I felt none of these emotions? Can you guess what I did feel? Hm. What’s this? What have we here? Hm. What I felt was a prickling at the base of the spine, a turning of the worm of interest.

Yes, interest! The worm of interest. Are you surprised? No? Yes? One conclusion I have reached here after a year in my cell is that the only emotion people feel nowadays is interest or the lack of it. Curiosity and interest and boredom have replaced the so-called emotions we used to read about in novels or see registered on actors’ faces. Even the horrors of the age translate into interest. Did you ever watch anybody pick up a newspaper and read the headline PLANE CRASH KILLS THREE HUNDRED? How horrible! says the reader. But look at him when he hands you the paper. Is he horrified? No. he is interested. When was the last time you saw anybody horrified?

Yet not even my sad case seems to interest you. Are you listening? What do you see down in the cemetery? The women getting ready for All Souls’ Day? whitewashing the tombs, trimming the tiny lawns, putting out chrysanthemums real and plastic, scrubbing the marble lintels. Catercornered from the cemetery if you look close is what used to be the Negro entrance to the old Majestic Theater, now Adult Cinema 16. Remember going there when we came to New Orleans? We used to see movies like The 49ers with — who? Vera Hruba Ralston (the hubba hubba girl) and Charles Starrett, or was it Veronica Lake and Preston Foster? Or Robert Preston and Virginia Mayo? Now they’re showing something called The 69ers. From here all you can make out of the poster is a kind of vague yin-yang, showing, I guess, a couple, as if Charles and Vera Hruba had got caught in the vortex of time and gone whirling yin-yanged down the years.

Across the street you can make out the blackboard of La Branche’s Bar. What’s the specialty today? Gumbo? Oyster po’ boys, shrimp soup? And Dixie draught.

New Orleans! Not a bad place to spend a year in prison — except in summer. Imagine being locked up in Birmingham or Memphis. What is it I can smell, even from here, as if the city had a soul and the soul exhaled an effluvium all its own? I can’t quite name it. A certain vital decay? A lively fetor? Whenever I think of New Orleans away from New Orleans. I think of rotting fish on the sidewalk and good times inside. A Catholic city in a sense, but that’s not it. Providence, Rhode Island, is a Catholic city, but my God who would want to live in Providence, Rhode Island? It’s not it, your religion, that informs this city, but rather some special local accommodation to it or relaxation from it. This city’s soul I think of as neither damned nor saved but eased rather, existing in a kind of comfortable Catholic limbo somewhere between the outer circle of hell, where sexual sinners don’t have it all that bad, and the inner circle of purgatory, where things are even better. Add to that a flavor of Marseilles vice leavened by Southern U.S.A. good nature. Death and sex treated unseriously and money seriously. The Whitney Bank is as solemn as the cemetery is lively. Protestants started Mardi Gras, you know. Presbyterians take siestas or play gin at the Boston Club. Jews ride on carnival floats celebrating the onset of Christ’s forty-day fast.

I like your banal little cathedral in the Vieux Carré. It is set down squarely in the midst of the greatest single concentration of drunks, drugheads, whores, pimps, queers, sodomists in the hemisphere. But isn’t that where cathedrals are supposed to be? It, like the city, has something else even more comforting to me, a kind of triumphant mediocrity. The most important event which occurred here in all of history was the John L. Sullivan — Jim Corbett fight. Three hundred years of history and it has never produced a single significant historical event, one single genius, or even a first-class talent — except a chess player, the world’s greatest. But genius makes people nervous, including the genius, so he quit playing chess and began worrying about money like everyone else. It is altogether in keeping that the famous Battle of New Orleans was fought after the war was over and was without significance.

After the terrible events at Belle Isle, a year of non-events in a place like this is a relief. There is a sense here of people seriously occupied with small tasks. We, you and I, our families, were different from the Creoles. We lived from one great event to another, tragic events, triumphant events, with years of melancholy in between. We lost Vicksburg, got slaughtered at Shiloh, fought duels, defied Huey Long, and were bored to death between times. The Creoles have the secret of living ordinary lives well. A hundred years from now I don’t doubt that women like those out there will be scrubbing the tombs on All Souls’ Day, a La Branche will be polishing his bar, and a dirty movie will be playing across the street.