Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

As it turned out, the god of both their non-faiths smiled on them and engineered their separation before they had time to have a child to mutilate.

But even in the absence of an actual boy child the penis, as a site of ritual disfigurement, had come between them.

“That psychological scarring we once discussed,” she began.

“Whose?”

“Yours.”

“What about it?”

“It’s there every time you make one of your footling, thing-centred jokes.”

“How could the trauma of mutilation turn me into a footler? If I’m the trivial man you accuse me of being it must mean I wasn’t mutilated enough.”

“That’s a naive understanding of cause and effect. You footle to disguise the pain. You cannot bear to accept that was what done to you was bestial in the extreme and so you try to joke it away — the proof of that being that your joking is always phallocentric.”

He felt suddenly very weary. Compound words ending in “centric” had that effect on him. “You’re right,” he said. He couldn’t tell her one more time that joking wasn’t in his nature. Nor could he tell her he neither looked nor felt mutilated. That would sound like empty denial or brute insentience, and both only went to show just how badly mutilated he was.

—

A question, then, for Shylock:

How merry was your bond? When you set the forfeit at an equal pound of Antonio’s fair flesh, to be cut off and taken from whatever part of his body it pleased you, what intended you by it? What intended you by it in the spirit of jest — that’s to say how far in earnest were you, and how far playing the devil they expected you to be? And what intended you in the matter of anatomy? Did you mean salaciously, flirtatiously even, to designate Antonio’s penis as the part it pleased you to take? Was that the pound of his fair flesh — weighing hyperbolically — you originally had your sights set on, before all jests went out of the window with your daughter?

They were sitting in Treviso, one of the Golden Triangle’s best restaurants. Two Michelin stars. Italian regional — to make Shylock feel at home — with the longest wine list in the north of England. “I’m half hoping,” Strulovitch had said when they first sat down, pausing only to ask the sommelier for her bloodiest Nebbiolo, “that Beatrice will walk in on her footballer’s arm. Foolish I know. But you will appreciate my folly.”

“So you haven’t gone after her?”

“I don’t want her to feel she’s on the run. If I let her go quietly there is a good chance she will not go far. I’m told he has a house close by. The natural thing is for her to go there, though I imagine it to be full of memorabilia of previous wives, maybe even full of previous wives themselves, and knowing Beatrice, she won’t fancy that. She was disgusted to discover I still possessed photographs of my first wife. Not just disgusted with me but with her mother for allowing me to keep them. So I guess he’s taken her to a hotel, and that it will be somewhere near. I’ve checked the fixture list and I see he has to turn up to play for Stockport County at the weekend, so he won’t be going far. And as for Beatrice, she won’t want to put too great a distance between her and her mother, no matter that she might not care how many miles she puts between her and me. Fast bind, fast find, didn’t work for you. I will let my maxim be, long rope gives hope.”

“Am I to take it from that that you will consent at last to the match?”

“No, I will not consent to the match. It is not a match. I haven’t watched over her all these years for nothing. Besides, it has become a battle of wills and principle now. But I must weigh my options.”

“And they include sparing him the cut?”

“Not necessarily. But the means of effecting it are not immediately to hand.”

He waited to see if Shylock had any suggestions, but he had none.

Strulovitch poured him more wine.

It was in this convivial if inconclusive spirit, after Shylock paused to send back the linguine with spider crab, or at least the spider crab, declaring the linguine delicious, that the two men fell naturally to discussing Shylock’s own original intentions, vis-à-vis Antonio’s flesh. Had his aim been Antonio’s privy parts, or Antonio’s heart?

“What makes you so sure,” Shylock wondered, “that I knew what I intended?”

“Are you saying you were making it up as you went along?”

“I didn’t have to. It made me up. There is a weight of history when a Jew speaks. I watch the care with which you measure your words. There are impressions you are afraid to give, but you give them anyway. When you walk into a room, Moses walks in behind you.”

“I have a degree from one of the oldest and finest English universities,” Strulovitch reminded him. “When I walk into a room bishops and Lord Chancellors walk in before me.”

“In your head, perhaps. But not in theirs. And you can no more escape what they see than what they anticipate. If a Jew strikes a bargain it is assumed it will be harsh. If a Jew makes a joke it is assumed it will be barbed. So why fight your history when your history is bound to win?”

“In order to confound it.”

“Some other night you can regale me with your victories. In the meantime, since you have raised the matter, you must let me continue with mine. If this is how you see me, I in effect told Antonio, then I won’t disappoint. He came to me loaded down with the weight of his implacable loathing, begging a favour without having the humility to beg it graciously — if anything, I was to understand (and be grateful), that the supplicant was me — in which circumstances how could I resist answering him in his own fashion, embodying his every fear, justifying every overheated rumour, every irrational superstition? If he spoke in metaphor and hearsay, I would speak in metaphor and hearsay in return. But note how little he actually hears of what I say to him. I am so to be disregarded as a man that he doesn’t bother to distinguish what I say in earnest from what I say in jest, cannot tell whether I am obsequious or impertinent, doesn’t even scruple to take umbrage at my salaciousness — for it is salacious to talk of taking flesh from whatever part of him pleases me, as though it is a sexual act and my fleshly pleasure is contingent on it. I am so to be disregarded, in fact — never mind hath not a Jew eyes : is not a Jew there ? — that he barely weighs the consequences of what he agrees. In his arrogance as a merchant he believes he has nothing to fear from the transaction, and in his arrogance as a Gentile he negates the Jew he is doing business with. I do not exist, my words do not exist, my threats and my pleasures do not exist — only the loan exists, only what he wants and believes he can get, consequence-free. Why should you be surprised, in that case, that when he forfeits I rest implacably on my bond?”

Strulovitch makes to speak but Shylock puts up a hand to stop him. Even a waiter, about to ask if everything is to the gentlemen’s satisfaction, steps back in fright.

“The question is rhetorical,” Shylock continues. “I don’t expect you to be surprised. No one should be. Antonio forfeits and what ensues must ensue — I must have my bond. Speak not against my bond. I am now become the thing he made me — my bond. I’ll have no speaking. I will have my bond. To my bond you have reduced me, and to my bond, and nothing other than my bond, you must answer. Don’t look for human pity. You never granted me the wherewithal to feel such an emotion before. How dare you expect it now? I am become the embodiment of your contempt. Prepare, then, to face the consequences not of who I am but of who you are. It is as the bond and only the bond that I speak. The villainy you teach me I will execute.”