I took the concept of neurosis from Freud, not long before Germaine Greer and Friedan applied the castration thing to him

In the previous section of this work I have tried to depict the instability and inconstancy of my life, which was due to the manner it was decided for me at every turn--especially at the crucial juncture in which I was in Europe--having to admit nonetheless that I contributed to that situation through mistakes which can only be deemed worthy of a moron. But I knew I wasn't a moron, if only because a moron by definition has a limited understanding of things, including the moronic condition itself. There was another powerful reason why I knew I wasn't a moron and it was that my apparently moronic behavior was a perfectly valid response to a world in which I had not observed anything that even remotely justified that I behave in any other than a moronic manner, and by this I mean not only the Apocrisiary and his sham marriage but also, just to cite a few cases, Tyrannos Marcus and the dumb tank battalion commander who overthrew him, Politico Romulus and his financial advisor Black Donkey, Eisenhower's deliberate dissimulation of his ability to express himself coherently, Nixon's famous dog act (fucking good, in a way), Khrushchev's oafish tap-dance routine at the UN, and, just to round things out with a touch of Armageddon, Kennedy's gamble that the Russians would not go the distance in backing Castro's obsession with the way the Spanish-American war turned out.

      Ruling out being a moron did not rule out being neurotic, or even, as I later realized, being quasi- if not wholly, psychotic. But I wasn't contemplating psychosis, if truth be told, because, like appreciating Nietzsche (an excellent connoisseur), it takes a lifetime to be able really to distinguish between sanity and insanity, by which time it really doesn't matter what you are or what you were. Essentially, you have to take a very long view, which I did not possess then, so I was banking on the conventional wisdom that if I was not particularly well-adjusted then the problem was neurosis.

      This is as good a time as any to summarize what I knew, at the point I am in my story, about the subject. The first indication I could be neurotic came to me as a lightning bolt whose unequivocal result was a firm commitment to some vague search for some uncertain problem about some undefined thing I called the self, which to be frank means that I didn't know then what hit me. The realization that it was neurosis came when I was in the dumps over a romantic situation I not only had concocted but had also needlessly embroiled. I obviously made the connection between this episode and Lightning Bolt Night and came to the conclusion that neurosis was the problem I had to contend with. However, if it had been as simple as it sounded I wouldn't be writing this now.

      I took the concept of neurosis from Freud, but as all the other concepts he invented were highly improbable--"penis envy" survived until Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan applied the castration thing to Freud himself--neurosis as such was a problem, and as to psychoanalysis, the practical side of Freudanism, I had no reason not to think most practitioners were on a level of quackery with Randy Spyberg, my own Taxiarch-inherited Freudian quack. So, I wasn't about to find the answer to my "neurosis" even at the source itself. But I did have strong reasons for suspecting that if I was indeed neurotic it had something to do with the Apocrisiary, and this might have been another good reason, besides my deep contempt for the Uptown University School of Journalism, why I had decided to drop and, in the same breath, to break with him. 

      As there were precedents for this break, significantly my marrying behind his back, it was not precisely a quantum leap, but I did pin high hopes on it, for if through this initiative I did not uproot neurosis, the least I would achieve was to put an end to the state of anomie characteristic of my life, which I interpreted--I am not sure if faithfully to Durkheim, who could be very vague himself--as alienation from my fellow human beings, their concerns and their passions. The irony was that in breaking with the Apocrisiary I ended up practicing journalism, which was precisely what he had intended for me all along. Why that was his intention, especially after I had in various circumstances demonstrated my intellectual aptitude and my vocation for a life of study--not unlike the contemplative station my cousin Angelico had attained, but without the religious content--can only be explained though his deep-seated mistrust of my ability to do anything other than breath. Arguably, he could have been thinking that I would carry on his own work, but, as his objectives in life were far from clear even to himself, this would only be a sharp example of fuzzy thinking, apparently, however, not any more so than my own final settling on being a hack. The "apparently" is very deliberate for there was reason in such madness.

      I possessed not only my nearly worthless Kings BA but also my University of Paris mention très bien. If the world had been a place in which merit received its due, it shouldn't have been difficult for me to get a teaching job in some university, but to my utter incredulity the responses to my applications were quite as umpromising as the abysmal indifference I inspired, during my first few days in The Republic, by walking around looking European, which meant wearing rumpled suits and loosely-knotted ties with loud shirts. I got two interviews in all: in one I was asked about the genome, which wasn't exactly in my field of expertise, and I said non-commitally that it was "interesting"--I thought at first my interviewer might have been mispronouncing gnome--and in the second, concerning a lowly position teaching grammar, I was sent to a meeting of my future peers, who looked askance at me and questioned my ability to spell my own name. As I wasn't about to debase myself to the extent of showing them I could, I made a dignified exit by saying I had obviously been sent to the wrong room, possibly the wrong building, maybe the wrong place, which I thought was an university. My ex-future peers, who impressed me as probably inclined to believe "gerund" was a call they used down in the farm to round up stray pigs, did not mind my ironies one bit. I didn't mind their cold shoulder either because I figured they were merely protecting their jobs

I get a job in a newspaper by undercutting the salary aspirations of all the other candidates, which results in that, despite my pinko posturing, I am repeatedly rejected by the newspapermen's union

There existed other career options, obviously. There were different types of teaching jobs other than at the universities, but they paid less than peanuts. There was taxi-cab driving, but this I was leaving for when all other possibilities had been exhausted. A bit closer to my competence, there was advertising, for which you did not need any education whatsoever, but that made my own background a disadvantage, and besides while I was in the School of Journalism I had taken a political turn leftwards and I did not look favourably on what I considered the most parasitic of all parasitic capitalistic occupations. This just about left journalism, short of driving a taxi or begging, and that's where at some point I began knocking on doors. I got to speak to Michel O. Sylvan. This Managing Editor thought he was an artist because he wrote novels that got a very big play in his own newspaper. He even organized a clandestine movement to have himself proposed as candidate for the Nobel Prize. Sylvan laughed in my face and advised me to get a job from the Apocrisiary.  Finally, after much pleading and pride-swallowing, I landed a lowly assistant foreign editor job in a paper that was on its pre-publication run.

      My immediate boss was totally ignorant of what he was doing and I soon showed him up. This got me the temporary chief foreign editor post--I also had to accept doing translations from all romance languages plus Middle English and German (the latter I knew from barely deciphering the librettos of Wagner's operas, but no one noticed my shortcomings)--until I trashed a garbled transmission of an obvious piece of propaganda against the Cuban revolution and was summarily fired. At this point I knew I was in trouble and that's when I heard of an opening in a provincial newspaper and I rushed there and grabbed it by undercutting the salary aspirations of the other candidates. This did not make me very popular in the profession and for many years after I was repeatedly rejected by the newspapermen's union, a gross injustice given my unmistakable pinko posturing.

      This newspaper was a rudimentary affair. The information it published was mainly local. The star reporter, Machote, spent most of his time doing the emergency wards and swilling beer with cops. International news was used as filler between stories, often invented on dull days, such as the one about peasants killed by rattlesnakes (with variations in which their companions also die when they suck off the poison), and the reporting of Chamber of Commerce events, which were occasions for drinking adulterated Scotch. The adulteration was done with water and vanilla, but no one noticed because the favorite brand was something called Ye Monks, probably made from unpalatable batches poured into clay jugs--this was its main selling point--which anyway they mixed with Cola or coconut milk. To fill gaps at the bottom of the pages the news editor, Juggy Moran, would dig into a drawer and pull out the first section of comic strip he chanced on and sent to type-setting without looking at it. This made following the adventures of Mandrake and The Phantom a fascinating experience in experimental narrative, which, as I was then an avid reader of the French nouveau roman, did not startle me too much, although I did realize it wasn't the way these particular productions were meant to be presented.

      My own work was vaguely "news editing": I was a sort of factotum who was supposed to do everything any time things got a little bit hectic, which was something I could have done blindfolded with half my brain shut down, so I had plenty of time to observe where the paper's internal so-called organization could be improved. I knew that I couldn't have gotten to Juggy Moran with any idea whatsoever--he believed he was doing brilliantly if he could write headlines and other captions that rhymed, like, say, "Contraband of billy goats/captured in smuggler's boats"--but I managed to become friendly with the paper's owner, Ludvig Piney, which, given my anti-social proclivities, was a feat I achieved mainly by forcing myself to act dumb but also through coincidence and an unexpected star performance.

My big chance comes when a tanker rams a bridge and the other journalists were celebrating with adulterated Ye Monks the election of Miss Payday

I met Piney the evening I covered the monthly banquet of the Rotary Club, in which he was a big poncho, and afterwards wrote up his speech announcing the organization's plan to have a bigger and better banquet next month. This in itself would not have done the trick, but one night, in the middle of Robbe-Grillet's Les Gommes, I got a call from the paper with the breaking news that a large tanker had rammed the bridge over the Straits knocking a whole section of it on itself and into the water and that there were casualties. Normally, I would not have been summoned, but early that evening all the reporters had started celebrating with innumerable cases of adulterated Ye Monks the election of Miss Payday--it was a long-standing tradition among them--and they were either unconscious or vomiting their souls out. The call actually came from the night sweeper, who got the tip from a cousin, so basically I had to take over, and I did so armed with a large lensed Leica I had bought at a brocanteur's in Paris.

      I flew like the wind in my little Fiat 1100--I always had little cars until I acquired a love-at-first-sight, second-hand Starfire, which almost bankrupted me in trying to repair it to its pristine state--and reached the port in time to jump on a fire department launch on its way to the accident. Everything was as terrible as it had been reported. There were huge chunks of concrete on the ship, there was the pathetic-looking gap in the bridge, there were large waves from currents hitting the ships' hull, and there were patches of illumination breaking the misty, wind-swept darkness from the ship's lights and from searchlights that had been set up on the scraggly, steel-spiked, mean-looking edges where the bridge had been ruptured. This allowed me to take as many photographs as I wanted, although I knew it was too dark for really good exposures.

      This was all well and good, but after about the twentieth time our launch circled the stricken boat, athwart the even more stricken bridge, I knew I had no story beyond what the sweeper's cousin had revealed. How had the accident happened? How could the ship had done that much damage, which was as if a jackal had floored an elephant by biting his balls? And especially, how many casualties were there and how had they died? I had to leave that unproductive situation and head back to town and start making enquiries somewhere, and that's when another launch, which had just peeled off from the ship's side, headed in our general direction and we signalled and it approached and I managed to jump from our launch to the other, which is where I got my big break.

      One of the occupants of the launch I was now on had been on board the tanker interviewing its captain on behalf of the oil company whose cargo the ship carried. In other words, he had all the facts and it didn't take much coaxing for him to spill them out for my benefit, perhaps because he felt self-important or he just wanted a rapt audience and I was it. At any rate, he did not act irresponsibly because it had really been an accident in which prima facie no one was to blame, at least not for the destruction of the bridge. To summarize, the tanker, a big one, had lost power and was rudderless, the anchors that were dropped could not brake it, and it just drifted against one of the bridge's pylons. The captain had made all the noises he could, but some cars had gotten through the toll booths on both sides even as the accident was happening and he had had to watch impotently as one car after another drove over the edges and fell the thirty meters or so to the water, where obviously all the passengers aboard were splattered. What was more, my informant had interviewed the entire crew on the bridge and they had counted the number of cars involved and even the number of people that were in them. Their figures turned out to be totally accurate, which must have been because under the circumstances the witnesses to that tragedy concentratred on what was happening to the exclusion of anything else in their minds.

      It was a sad story, but I could do nothing to change it, and the important thing was that I had it in its fundamental details. On the return trip I couldn't help remembering my former classmates at the School of Journalism, especially the one who had bragged about getting through police lines, and thinking I hadn't done too badly despite having dropped out. My work however was not over. It was daytime by the time I got back to the port and it occurred to me that to cap the night's work what I needed were aerial photographs and for that I called the house of a pilot I knew--my love of flying had grown considerably and the local airport, which was within city limits, was one of the places I frequented--and got him out of bed and told him my story, which sufficed to have him up and in a plane with me in no time. We flew in circles over the site of the accident and again I took as many pictures as I wanted. The previous day's edition of the paper was of course circulating and when I got back to the office I met resistance for an extra from the mule-headed rhymester of a news editor, but I circumvented that by calling the owner who sensibly gave the go-ahead. That particular edition, which was basically constructed with some pages from the one in circulation with a spanking new front page (and another page for the spill over) with monster-sized headlines in jet-black ink, was entirely my doing. I went to bed around noon and slept on through for 24 hours, a record I have never even come close to afterwards.

In sorting out Mandrake and the Phantom, I have a falling out with Juggy Moran but enter into the good graces of Ludvig Piney, which was what counted

When I returned to work all I got from my mean-spirited colleagues were dirty looks, but I didn't mind because I had other plans, which still involved being a factotum but on a much more exalted level. For that I had to do a big soap job on my ultimate boss Piney, but that wasn't too difficult because every time the Rotarians met he specifically asked for me to do the reporting, which I did to his entire satisfaction by making as if he was a composite of Lorenzo da Medici and Andrew Carnegie. This went on until the day I convinced him to let me have one page exclusively for teletype news, a portentous achievement that had my co-workers foaming at the mouth. And that was nothing compared to the indignation that ensued when I discovered Piney couldn't make heads or tails of the story lines of The Phantom and Mandrake, which he thought was the cartoonists' fault, and resulted in authorizing me to get things organized there too. This produced another new section in the newspaper and more gaps in other pages my colleagues couldn't fill with snake-bite stories, which was the equivalent of using the man-bites-dog ploy every day or even more than once a day.

      Basically what I had done was to get me a permanent foreign news editorship, a rather unimpressive eminence considering I was the only person I could boss around, and even in this I had to tread very carefully. My ambitions were obviously for myself but to have them come true I needed to prove that I could make the newspaper more profitable because its owner, my so far satisfied sponsor, was a shrewd self-made man who wouldn't put up a penny without making sure he would be getting two in return. He had made his fortune by working different ends of the same market: he sold refrigerators and he also had an ice factory. The extent of his culture was a round-the-world trip he and his family made, from which they returned with a lot of portable junk they bought in hotels' lobbies and a vast fund of knowledge about hotel rooms. To convince a man like that to let me run his newspaper would take the equivalent of showing him a way to make ice without using water. And there was also the matter of my political leanings, to explain which I feel I must go back all the way to France, for they were entirely circumstantial and not something I held the way a person might a religious affiliation acquired in early childhood.

      I mentioned my reactionary phase, which was not intense and dissipated gradually but completely. That was in Paris at the time of the Fourth Republic and apart from revolving-door politics there was nothing spectacular going on. The Cold War was still raging, but Eisenhower was a lame-duck and the Soviets were biding their time. I do not recall having strong political feelings--although I did read the leftist Le Monde, but then I have always been partial to serious (and mostly boring) newspapers without comic strips--and the Ultramontanism I flirted with consisted in reading authors like Bernanos and Montherlant (a sour-looking French novelist who thought of himself as a ladies man). Things changed when I went to the School of Journalism for two reasons: one, I had not wanted to go back to New York from Europe and I was in a prejudicial frame of mind; and two, as my return to The Republic was inevitable, I saw political issues in terms of Third World problems.

      Now, I knew enough to realize that communism was a crock and that it would never take hold in Western Europe or in America, but in economically backward countries the situation was different, and it was there that I thought communism/Marxism (the terms were interchangeable as far as I was concerned) had a point. It could be said that like Lenin, alias Snow White, I was misapplying Marxist doctrine, which was quite clear on the question of who would be shedding their chains, namely, industrial workers and not peasants, who weren't supposed to be bright enough to know they were in chains. Mao Tse-tung in China and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam had conquered through peasant-power, yet they insisted that they were true Marxists--at least the Bolsheviks had done it with the backing of factory workers in St.Petersburg and Tallinn--and this sounded like cases of schizophrenia next to which Nietzsche's symptoms were those of a common cold or the sniffles, unless, as was quite likely, Marxism was just a mask for legitimizing political violence. My case was wholly different in that I was not in the business of leading masses and I did not for one moment believe in the dialectical materialism claptrap, but I did believe that communists were capable of instilling discipline and culture in the savages in The Republic. Actually, my thinking was a mite more complex than that.

      The part about finding Marxism incoherent was true enough, as I proved beyond a doubt to myself when I conducted a seminar on Marx and couldn't manage even a mildly plausible definition of surplus value. Was it, for instance, that workers were paid only the value of a radiator instead of that of the entire car, which was their due? Or was it the value that went into the machine for making the radiator, which meant that in justice the workers that made the car were not entitled to its entire value? So how did you then share out the car? The logical solution would have been to give each worker a part of every car, which they could then re-assemble and assign to themselves according to their needs, like giving priority to a worker who wanted to be taxi driver. But then would a car pool not have been the correct way to proceed? And if so, where would that leave the taxi driver? Admittedly, workers could take the subway, but then why build cars at all? Only when you looked at the mechanics of subway construction you would face the same problem as with car-building with the result that the really Marxist solution would have workers riding donkeys to factories where they would sit around and debate how to distribute non-existent surplus value, which is not a bad description, for instance, of the Cuban economy.

      There was another way to approach the issue and that was to define surplus value as that part of value the workers did not get in order to live at a mere subsistence level. Capitalists of course hogged surplus value, but that took us back to the car-building analogy, and this meant exploiters would be keeping for themselves cars without radiators. The nub of the problem was that according to Marx who got it from Ricardo only labour creates value which implied that capitalists who made, say, workers' overalls, a labour intensive industry, would be making proportionally more profits that Standard Oil, a capital intensive company, and that didn't sound right. Towards the end I began acting dumb and the participants in my seminar dropped out en masse.

With the help of the Costa Rican commie poet Iggy St Croix, my dissimulations are stupendously successful

What I did find coherent was that politics was driven by economics and that politics that did not do something about the economics that resulted in economic backwardness, as in The Republic, were self-evidently spurious, and since these politics had the backing of America, then it was the duty of every conscientious man or woman to fight for a revolution, like the one that Castro was just starting in Cuba and like the one that the Chinese had launched with a succesful onslaught on flies and the Vietnamese with the licking they had dealt the French in Dien Bien Phu. However, in my vocabulary fighting for a revolution did not entail by any means actual fighting, or even street mobs (which as I already made clear I frowned on), and given that radicals in The Republic had gone insurrectionary because they felt they had been shortchanged during the period after the overthrow of Tyrannos Marcus, for a revolutionary like me there was nothing left to do but to infiltrate and dissimulate (anything else would have meant another sacking, which I could not afford) and saying, during rueful, self-sacrificial moods usually induced under the influence, that "I knew I would be the first victim of the revolution". There's coherence for you!

      Obviously, I could not go to the paper's owner with these subtleties, so if I wanted to get anywhere as a hack I had to do a lot of dissimulating. On the whole, I was doing it quite well, thanks in part to the support of my only friend in the staff, a Costa Rican poet, Iggy St Croix, who was more than just a pinko like me and reined in my occasional starts, as when I wrote an article in which I described newly independent states in Africa as pseudo-nations--he patiently explained this was a no-no in communist circles--or like the time I was so indignant over the American blockade of Cuba I wrote an editorial in which I said the Soviet rockets were in Kennedy's pineal gland and my friend wisely told me to nix it.

      From these observations, you will have deduced that my dissimulations had worked and that I had managed to have a free hand in the running of the newspaper. I did this through constructive innovations, which my co-workers called meddling, but which gradually built up to a much more presentable product. This made the owner proud and more disposed to support me, but to really get Piney completely behind my efforts a couple of things happened that went definitely my way.

      The loser in my zero-sum game was the rhymester editor Moran, who saw his influence and authority eroded without being able to do anything about it, mainly because he hadn't a clue about what was going on. For him the final straw came when I was given co-responsibility for the paper's week-end edition, which meant in practice I could act as chief editor twice a month.

      Like Snort the Surrealist poet, Juggy Moran was not a congenial drinker and, to his credit, unlike Snort he was usually abstemious, but one week end I was in charge he got good and soused and went to the newspaper and barged into my office and sat in my chair while I was out. When I returned he looked at me defiantly and shouted: "This is my newspaper and I am the boss around here". He didn't say anything else, which I interpreted as meaning he just wanted to sit on my chair, but this apparently was not what he meant because when I suggested that perhaps I could use his office, he started banging the desk, like Khrushchev in the United Nations but with his fists, and told me I was a dirty, double-dealing back-stabber, which was noisy but unoriginal. As I still was not reacting, he fired me in front of everybody and to close shouted: "And never come back".

      By this time, however, even my second worst enemy knew that he was overdoing it because he did not have that authority and especially because it was obvious he was seeing double. Some of the other guys went over to him and tried to calm him down, but that only made him angrier, so they humoured him and said he was the boss and that he deserved all the rest he could get that night for being such a great boss and this pacified him enough for them to lift him gently to his feet whereupon he flung his helpers aside saying he was perfectly sober and he left screaming that I was a son of a whore and that if I was not gone by tomorrow he would do to my mother what he usually did to his wife, which left me in a state of puzzled indignation.

      Next day of course was a different story. I resented Juggy's improprieties against me but I knew the state he had been in the night before, and what's more important, he did as well. Iggy, who saw a great chance to become a real grey eminence, reported the incident to Piney and when Moran arrived he had a summons from on high. I have never been the vengeful sort and besides where I had arrived I did not want any competition I did not already know, so when my erstwhile boss gave me an apologetic look I told him we would go together and talk to the owner and sort things out, which we did, but after that the disrespectful news editor never again stood in my way.

      Another circumstance that favoured me was that, for reasons that might or might not have had to do with the changes I had introduced in the newspaper, circulation was up, and up by a lot, right there in irrefutable black numbers. I got this information through Angelita, a secretary with whom I had become cozy, as I will confess later, and I made good use of it. I was given a supervisory job in the paper with a meaningless title I can't even remember, for what I cared about was the substance and particularly the bonuses I was offered and got every year's end.

The norm was that every headline required a different font making front pages look like ransom demands

I must make clear that this culmination in my career as a hack did not come as easily as I might have made it sound. It took years of meddling and putting up with Medusa stares and with rumor-mongering in which I was depicted as everything from being a Tequila-drinker (and not the kosher Ye Monks) to having had my photo taken with a poor whore who hung around the paper giving blow jobs. Identifying me from the purported photograph would have required an inspection of one of my genital members (which was the only part of me the photo was supposed to show) and the paper's owner was not enthusiastic about that apart from having little interest in my private affairs as long as they did not affect my work. And my work, I will say immodestly, was excellent and if I have doubts about its effect on circulation it is only because, not having forgotten Professor Duplex's lessons on Hume, I could not claim that there was a demonstrable cause-effect relationship and not just a fortuituous convergence of events, which could only have been refuted through predictive accuracy and I was not about to put my advancement on the line by making claims about increased readership in the future.

      I will not go into a boring inventory of all the things I achieved different from the changes in the treatment of international news and the greater respect accorded to the authors of Mandrake and the Phantom--the other strips were of the one-off, punch-liner sort--and I will only say that by the time I was done with it, the provincial rag I had taken over had the appearance of a half-decent newspaper with a typographical style of its own. This alone put it in the vanguard of journalism in The Republic, where the norm was that every headline required a different font, not out of stylistic considerations but because their setting was left up to Ludlow operators, who couldn't have cared less if front pages came out looking like kidnapper's ransom demands.

      From my unspecified high rank I did have to deal with some thorny problems, among which was that the tables had turned and I had now to find a way to control St Croix and this I managed by giving him my former international news editor job and reminding him of the prudent counsels he had previously bestowed on me. Even so, he got carried away by the Algerian war of independence and he became somewhat reckless in the choice of news items he featured and headlined, which was intended to denigrate French paratroopers as dirtbags and to portray all Algerians as noble, willing martyrs in the cause of freedom, even if they were child rapists who happened to be in the way when the Blackfeet--that's what French-descended Algerians called themselves--went on their indiscriminate killing warpath, a tactic they used which was a big public relations hit all over the world. This pro-Algerian independence stance made even Piney, who didn't exactly know where Algeria was--he missed it on his world tour--a bit suspicious, and later influenced the outcome of our relationship, but as my friend was not inventing anything I managed to shield him and also gave him the peremptory order to cool it.

      This incident had two significant but contradictory consequences on my political thinking at different times in my life. At that moment, it was proof that news presentation was not objective even when it involved facts. This was the sort of distortion that allowed the Soviet press to portray Americans as over-exploited, starving, disoriented proletarians--the commies used, among other things, postcards of lynching-parties and photographs from Now Let Us Praise Famous Men--as it also permitted American revisionist historians to blame the Korean War on a couple of South Korean infiltrators caught in the act and not on the massive invasion of the south sponsored by Stalin and directed by the Supreme God Who Makes The Sun Rise In The East Kim Il Sung. The same technique was used to depict Soviet science as the result of microfilms sneaked out of the United States inside pumpkins and dictators outside the Soviet sphere as well-meaning but misguided philanthropists.

      The other consequence was my eventual insight that, despite the blatant misuse of information, its chaotic abundance is far superior to its dearth, even if openness and breast-beating for past misdeeds hardly compensates for the inevitable tendency to slant the news in the present. Saying you're sorry for the lynching of blacks and in the same page claiming that The Birth of a Nation is the greatest film that ever was, as American newspapers will do, either takes an inordinate degree of gall or shows a lot of garden variety hypocrisy. Alternatively, it just means editors are careless, but this is not consistent with the vast amounts of money spent in American society in supervising the supervisors. It would be as if it were by sheer accident that blacks, usually portrayed in films as speaking jive, are the ones who always tell jargon-using whites: "Speak English, man!"

      Even though in my dissimulator-hack role I deplored a lot of the obvious impostures and prevarications that arrived via teletype, I knew in my heart of hearts I did not relish the prospect of becoming the object of a revolutionary firing squad or being sent for re-education to an equivalent of Vorkuta, where my chances of a mention très bien were not good. But, as every one knows, talk is cheap and I could say the contrary of what I believed and sound as if I really believed my own words.

I acted like a self-righteous, egotistical weasel, a characterization of which Juggy Moran would have approved (unfairly)

Necessary dissimulation aside, in my position as lord of the universe I could do anything I wanted as long as I did not mess around with Piney or his family. Just to give an example, one of his daughters sued for divorce and he was so supportive that he had the judge decree the removal of his former son-in-law's surname from his grandchildren, which legally made them bastards.

      One of the things for which I did use my exalted position was trying to learn to use a linotype machine, an ugly, clanking, ungainly artifact--it looked like a huge insect and smelled like the inside of a car hood--for which I had an admiration comparable to a personal cargo-cult. Linotypes are today as obsolete as bakelite dial phones and adding machines and the last one I saw was in Bombay fifteen years ago, but to me they were the epitome of rationality. You sat at a keyboard and pressed softly the keys which released from a rack small metal tabs with letter molds on their thin front edges. These fell into a slot forming a packet of a specified length which you then had to lift carefully with a lever to a running device that transported it to a large shiny metal drum where a jet of a molten lead alloy hit the molds resulting in the thin rectangular chips with a line of type on one edge--hence the unimaginative name for the contraption--that went into galleys and into page setting. Lifting the lever was a delicate art and if you did not treat it with due respect, the molds could be knocked out of their slot and what the running mechanism took to the impression drum was empty space upon which the jet of metal would squirt out and make a shiny blob that blocked the machine. The operators there called this a shit pile. Repairing the damage required chipping away at the lead, which came off easily enough with hammer and chisel but there was a lot of it and all had to be removed.

      I took about two lessons with one of the operators and when I decided to go on my own I immediately produced a god-awful shit pile and that was the end of my incursions into the print shop, with which on the whole I did not have good relations as my one big failure in the news room was that I could not get my minions to obey the abusively early deadline the printing boss--an embittered old guy named Pernod who wore huge trousers held up with suspenders--demanded. This was the cause of constant bickering in which memos flew to the mighty lord of us all. Pernod, who considered beddy-byes more important than atomic-bomb tests, wanted to close business at an unconscionably early hour, which I resisted by acting deaf to his roaring and cursing. He had the backing of the distribution department, whose truck drivers claimed they were experts on circulation and, as far as they were concerned, a paper was ready for delivery when the police news was printed. As Piney probably thought that a deadline was a horizontal trace with a straightedge, a final decision never finally came down, all of which goes to show that I wasn't as almighty as I thought.

      In particular I wasn't Mr Perfect Husband in my relations with Candice. Our marriage had not been blessed by auspicious circumstances--it was when all is said and done, however much Candice and I might have loved each other, an act of deception--and it soon settled into a rather indifferent relationship, including the sexual side. Candice's leaving me in Europe said it all, even if upon my return from New York we did manage to patch it up, but this is giving me much too much credit because I did most of the asking and she did all of the granting. Later I did recompense her generosity in helping me through the difficult period when I was trying to land a job, but I did not reciprocate the feelings that inspired her to be generous with me. In other words, I acted like a self-righteous, egotistical weasel, a characterization which Juggy Moran would have enthusiastically approved. Nonetheless, he was in the wrong in our own confrontation--a bit of humility on his part would have been welcome--and I should not leave Candice entirely off the hook either. She knew better than I did that our marriage had not gotten off on the right foot and she did not show any empathy for the stresses I was under.

      If there is one fact that merits reiterating in my previous "fictional" account of our marriage, it is that I was very emphatic about the hazards of an association with me. The only thing that I did not say was caveat emptor, but I doubt she would have understood. I think I might even have told her about my whoremongering proclivities, although maybe not, but on this terrain, even if I had been brutally frank, I don't think we would have come to an understanding, because what I expected wittingly or not was for her to act like a whore for me and she had not had the sort of upbringing that would have initiated her into such postures, even if she had been willing to assume them under my coaching, which she wasn't. This made me a sucker for temptations outside matrimony, although I was always very remorseful about yielding to them, which is like saying you hate chocolate after downing a gallon of chocolate chip ice cream.

The girls at the secretarial pool would have preferred laying with porkers than with my newsroom colleagues

My co-workers at the newspaper were not exactly the stuff of glamour nor were they particularly romantic--if anything they tended to the fat and cynical, one exception being a spindly Spaniard who claimed he lost an arm in the Civil War although Machote insisted, probably falsely, he had seen tiny nails where the stump should have been--but there were always women hanging around the paper's premises. Some, like the promiscuous cocksucker, were very low in the social scale, but others just got some kind of weird thrill from being there and talking to or going out with the reporters, most of whom were married men with a good excuse for coming home late. I usually kept my distance from such goings on, but there was a fat woman whom I occasionally observed in tight fitting dresses which emphasized her natural bulges and this made me so erectile that one day I said: "Hello", and the next moment I was in her room across the street and she was showering and I was getting hotter and hotter and when, preceded by a powerful scent somewhere between strong musk and methyl alcohol, she made her fully naked appearance but for an abundant application of talcum powder, I went and spilled myself all over her bed. As I fled in shame and disgust from her room, I understood once again, from the unmistakable tone and contents of her utterances, that I was not as all-powerful as I wanted to believe.

      Not all my sexual encounters were quite as anti-climatic as this one. Some of the girls in management and accounting were both appetizing and refined. They would no more have fallen for my newsroom colleagues than they would have lain with porkers, but I was in a different category and it was understood that they could be fair game if I wanted them, which I did a few times without major consequences because I did feel I owed Candice some loyalty, until Angelita, she of the circulation department, came along. She was unmarried, young, horny, and bursting with enticing flesh. It could be seen that if she did not take care of her person she would eventually bulge out like the victim of my recent ejaculatio praecox. I honestly tried postponing her, but she was insistent and regularly spent her coffee-breaks in my office (on one of which occasions it was that she told me about the paper's improving circulation figures). I would have been less than a man if I had not accepted her proferred womanhood and so it happened that, one night on the beach, we were talking and beating around the bush until I went and threw her on her lovely butt on the sand and there and then--the place was deserted--undressed her and had her to the beat of the lightly breaking surf. Angelita became a regular habit, pleasurable and undemanding, until I had my first unmistakable psychological cataclysm. The word is collapse, but I prefer the bloated exaggeration, and anyway this happened much later.

      In my Kim Il Sung-like avatar I enjoyed perks of different kinds. The lowliest, in my estimation, was a prize for notable achievement in journalism. The diploma was written in cod-Gothic letters and I later gave it a decent wooden frame, but I did not attend the ceremony nor advise I was not attending. This was a breach of etiquette I still regret but only when I think back on all the rejection letters I have received since then from publishers and assorted assholes because as to the giver of the prize, the local Municipal Council, my opinion could not have been lower if I had been a Brahmin and it had been kicked out from a community of untouchables.

      Much more acceptable were a couple of free trips: one to the United States, invited by some semi-private pro-American group (probably CIA-funded), and the other to some journalists' congress in Geneva. During the first trip they insisted I stick with the group, but I broke loose in New York and that might have been the time of my re-encounter with Nilda and Spyberg. In Washington, we attended a reception in which a diplomat sat on the rug next to the easy chair where I was trying to eat without spilling the food--I hate buffets--but I got rid of him by sitting on the rug next to him. The airplane ticket to Geneva was open-ended so I stayed on after the congress and did some travelling.

      But the perks I most appreciated were the year-end bonuses. They were not big: substantial would be about the right size, but they made a considerable difference in my lifestyle. My average monthly earnings jumped--my nominal salary was lower than Candice's--and as we were not spendthrifts--after New York and Paris, what would we be throwing money at where we lived?--we were saving a tidy pile and making sound investments, mostly in property, which was about all there was to invest in. On the whole, my life was becoming routinary. There was not much more I could do at the newspaper short of taking really drastic measures to increase circulation such as giving it away.

My complete dedication to the French nouveau roman and my disappointment with L'avventura, a sophisticated Italian movie that was like Jaws without the shark

My marriage was getting so cold an exciting night at home was a game of chess with Candice, who nearly always beat me because I tended to get distracted from sheer boredom. Outside home Angelita was alright for an afternoon of sex or an occasional night out, but she might have wanted more, like money, and I did not wish to complicate our entanglement. To fill time I stepped up extra-work activities I had been carrying on since before I became a hack. One of these was philosophy. My notes on Heidegger date from this period, as does my final disillusionment with Sartre. I was still an avid listener of classical music. In particular, I assigned myself the task of reading and analyzing every damn nouveau roman that had been written.

      I began with the works of Robbe-Grillet, which were not that nouveau--they were detective novels--save for some stuff I might have missed from an "experimental phase" in his career and the screenplay for a film titled L'année dernière à Marienbad which consisted of silent figures moving about inside a mansion with lots of mirrors and still pictures of the central characters staring hard at the audience. I had a theory once on the meaning of this odd movie--something to do with thinking about instead of actually doing certain things, like talking or having sex--but the film was so boring that in a rating system from 1 to 10 in which 10 is most boring it would get about 256, a bare notch above or below Hiroshima Mon Amour, so I wouldn't waste synapses trying to recall it in detail. There was also a fellow named Butor, an apt and prophetic name as freely translated and adapted to English it could mean "some one who crashes his head against something", which was the experience one had upon trying to read him. Butor might or might not have been the author of a roman--I dare not use the word novel, and I think the author was really Saporta--which came in a package which contained a stack of about 256 unbound pages which you were supposed to shuffle and every time you would get a different work. I couldn't get beyond the first half of the first page I pulled out much less read any of the--how many?--about a billion trillion works you could derive with this method.

      In my considered opinion the ultimate in French "new novelists" was Claude Simon, but not in terms of entertainment, which wasn't the case of any one of his works, but of seeming incomprehensibility, except for one novel titled L'Inquisitoire, which contains a description of a banquet such as only my old friend Proust, or Rabelais, or maybe Dürrenmatt, could have equaled, but he buried it in about 600 pages of pure dialogue about nothing very remarkable. Simon's other works, the really impenetrable ones, had plots in which characters changed names arbitrarily or went from one room to another without using doors--they even turned into doors--an intelligent reader understood intuitively that Simon was into a deconstruction of logic, which would have been more persuasive if it wasn't so relentlessly logical in its anti-logical stance.

      My delvings into unconventional narrative styles had begun even before I tackled le nouveau roman, for I had been reading Cesare Pavese. My interest in Pavese had derived from Antonioni, the epitome of post-war Italian sophistication. His movies were at times incredibly beautiful, but his plotting left much to be desired, as was the case of L'avventura, in which a luscious blonde from the idle classes disappears while swimming in the Mediterranean and after much talk of pece cane one never finds out what happened to her. It was like Jaws without the shark. This was giving symbolism more than its due and I thought I could more profitably fish for abstruse meanings in literature.

      I had read a few of Pavese's novels about listless, chattering Turinese and was trying to screw up my courage to read his diary until another local Paris veteran--Ern Unloyal, an intense no-nonsense type who started as another Surrealist poet but quickly cut the pretense--told me flatly that Pavese had been a coward and an impotent which was why he had killed himself. It was quite a summary. I did not trust it altogether but it gave me an excuse to postpone sine die my encounter with another diarist, which to be quite honest I dreaded from my experience with Amiel and his constant masturbating. Just to show that I was not spiteful, when my friend Unloyal, the succint summarizer, invited me to participate in a forum he had organized on the centenary of Dario, the great Nicaraguan poet--a countryman of the expert on Luncheonette I had met in Oxford--I took the opportunity I was afforded to advise everyone to read Dario before his 200th anniversary came around.

Beckett's maître à penser really did believe Descartes' claim that it was a demon provoking his erections

The climax in my critical endeavours was my complete absorption in the works of Samuel Beckett. Now, Beckett, as every one knows, is a genius and he thoroughly deserved his Nobel Prize--not bad for a Paddy who survived in Paris by giving English lessons--but whoever claimed he is an easy read would be a shameless liar. Furthermore, no one really knows what it was that Beckett went on about, perhaps not even himself, which isn't surprising considering that his philosophical maître à penser was a fellow named Geulincx, a Dutch thinker who really believed Descartes when he said that it was a mischievous demon provoking his erections. This, incidentally, is called solipsism.

      Beckett is even more difficult than Joyce, whose Ulysses was the subject of a gigantic paraphrasis that at Kings was more read than the original itself. His only fully succesful work was the play Waiting for Godot, in which he acts coy but scatters enough clues, starting with the title itself, to make Broadway audiences think they were being served really advanced literary fare. Even the humour, for which the work is famed, is schematic and not very funny, as if clowns' attires were in themselves comic, which possibly they are, for five-years olds. Beckett began his career with a novel about kite-flying in Dublin which was absolutely machine-like in its precision but thereafter he abandoned the conventions of the genre with such thoroughness that, if we take Proust to be the supreme master of the traditional novel, then Beckett, who wrote a monograph on Proust, can be placed at the opposite extreme as its deliberate and implacable subverter. This yuxtaposition might indicate a kind of exhaustion in a literary tradition, but such symmetry and tidiness seldom obtain in human affairs, although it is arguable that after Beckett most of what has been published in the guise of novels is crap. Beckett himself wrote a playlet called Krapp's Last Tape, of which it can be said, if you want to sound very sophisticated, that it is hilarious.

      Be that as it may, when I first read L'innomable, Beckett's most famous work, I soon understood at least what it was about, which does not necessarily mean I could say what it was he wanted to express. It consists of one huge piece of babble from beginning to end in which two sets of rules are respected: those of grammar and those of association (admittedly the latter are not hard and fast). Without grammar I didn't think even Editions de Minuit, which published the 256 deck-of-cards roman, would have published it.  Association was the key to the work and it resulted in such motifs as circularity, echolalia, repetition, spirality, centrifugalization and centripetalism, serpents eating themselves, internal monologue and dialogue, going astray and coming back, dogs chasing their tails, sidetracking and maintracking, and so on. But was there really a "maintrack"? Yes, there was a peremptory first-person singular voice which ("who" would not be justified here) tried to maintain discipline over the words swirling around themselves, but this was as if a forecaster had said: "Let's have some scattered showers out there", instead of: "Scattered showers are expected today"; or as if a floorwalker had tried to form a queue with a mob of screaming females during a year's end sale in Harrod's. The meaning of the words themselves concerned the issue of whether or not to "go on"--a foregone conclusion really--and this was uncannily like my holding-time-back obsession in The Walden and I understood that Beckett was writing about consciousness and its messed up neurotic manifestations.

      Now, this is all well and good--though I admit Beckett can be read in any number of other ways--but I am talking here of my bedtime readings! After L'innomable, instead of giving it a rest, like a castaway rescued by a cruise liner who asks to go for a long dip in the swimming pool, I went into other similar productions in Beckett's oeuvre until about ten pages into Comment c'est--a roman whose title means "How it is" althought neither the "how" nor the "it" nor the "is" are explained or even dealt with--I decided I had had enough. Maybe I wanted to turn back from the edge but I had already given too many hostages to fortune and I was not going to walk away unscathed. Something was brewing--like the dry electric storms that silently crossed the night--but I didn't know what, although I should have.

In the midst of my nervous collapse, my wife finds out about Angelita, whose existence I brazenly deny

      You will have noticed that I have not used the word neurosis once in the description of this period in my life, but if you think that it had gone away you must have started believing you were reading another book. Neurosis was like a maw which had closed but was being beset by a tremendous urge to yawn, not unlike what I frequently felt in my self-imposed literary studies, which were one of the reasons neurosis was about to remind me that it still existed, for I had been neglecting it and trying to disguise my neglect with a surfeit of activity.

      An inventory requires that I emphasize the newspaper routine, which was monotonous but not undemanding. There was also that I was managing what to me then was the equivalent of George Soros' fortune. I have not mentioned that in addition at some point Candice and I began building a house and that work on it was being regularly interrupted and even abandoned by the ungrateful contractor who had won a public-works bid about which I had helpfully informed him from tips I obtained through personal contacts. I was not much of a drinker then and my only vice were Montecristo cigars which in my pursuit of perfection I had also decided to cut. Without knowing it, I had driven myself to the precipice and I was trying to keep my balance and not looking back. One misstep or one loose brick and I would take a bad tumble.

      My decision to relent on the heavy readings was not as effective as I hoped it would be. For one thing, the very following day in the office I got the bad news that a decrepit building I had bought on the cheap for the rent was starting to fall apart. It wasn't that bad, but that's not how the news struck me at the time. And the literary switch I made was not all that drastic, because I went from Beckett to Italo Calvino, which was somewhat in the nature of jumping from the fire into the frying pan. I had already read a novel by Calvino about an arboreal philosophe--it was as if Rousseau or Helvetius had decided to imitate Tarzan--and that was OK, but the novel I went home to that night was about a viscount divided in two and it wasn't making much sense to me. Normally, I would read until two or three in the morning and fall asleep. This time I read and read and neither understood why the viscount was split in two nor did I even fall into a mild drowse.

      I got up at first light and walked in the yard trying to figure out why I was feeling like the viscount and not liking it one bit but I did not make any headway on this point either. Back in the office I tried to deal with the problem of the crumbling building, but did not feel up to the task. On the way home, it came to me that I had been doing the same route along the same coastal avenue at least four times a day for the last six years. After lunch, I settled down for another bout of reading. This time I chose the last edition of NG hoping the need for sleep would catch up to me in the form of a restful siesta, but when I was in the middle of an Alaskan earthquake--the last picture I saw was of a house half-sunk into what looked like a badly potholed highway, which surely reminded me of my own fraught property--I realized I was in trouble.

      I had only Candice to turn to and I did looking like a stray cat with a mangled paw and she was surprised but stroked my head. This was helping a little when the phone rang and she answered and came back to me with one direct question: "Who is Angelita?" My answer--"She's nobody"--did not convince her and she stopped stroking my head. I took another tack and said that maybe someone had the wrong number, but that didn't melt the ice either. I did not improve things by claiming that Candice was hearing things and finally I had to settle for licking my own paw.

      Back once again in the office I considered carefully what it might have been that had suddenly befallen me and at first I could only think it was the gravitational force of Jupiter, which upon reflection I broke down into the more manageable dimensions of excess work. But things were getting complicated. Angelita's call had let the cat out of the bag--not me however who felt as I were in a bag about to be thrown in the nearest body of water--and Candice concluded, unreasonably in my opinion, that she had enough of my betrayals.

      This was something I had not bargained for, but at that stage I had no choice in the matter. Events were dragging me along and there was nothing I could do but let myself be dragged. Candice was adamant and I had run out of arguments. If I had been able to I would have chucked everything for a trip in Western Turkestan, which was then part of the USSR and mostly out of bounds for tourists, but even if it wasn't I could not afford one. The next best thing was to take Librium and try to come to an arrangement that would provisionally allow me to get some of kind of act together.

My first short story, "The Torturer", is tortured to death by the page designer of the literary periodical which published it

The first step was to give up my literary studies, which I substituted with the novels of Agatha Christie, ingenious stuff occasionally but in particular for my purpose as intellectually demanding as using a towel. I have never read a detective novel--and after Christie I did the gamut and only drew the line with Erle Stanley Gardner, whose fans must be bored catatonics--of which I can honestly say I even half-tried to guess who the culprit was. I never cared and my interest in the genre lies in enjoying the art with which the puppets are pulled--not unlike my primary film-viewing impulse--or in finding out how outlandish the outcomes can be.

      The second thing I had to do was arrive at a settlement with Candice. This wasn't so hard. Although I had not yet become aware of it, I was nearly through with being a hack. My first experiment in real living from under the thumb of the Apocrisiary was coming to an end. In brief, I was fed up and this made it easy for me to give in to anything Candice demanded. In the event, what I did was turn the house over to her--it had finally been completed after I threatened to sue the contractor--and divide the rest of our assets in two. I knew I got the short end of the stick because most of our savings had gone into the house but I didn't mind. I still had my job and I figured I could buy some time to decide what I wanted to do next.

      I rented an apartment near the airport and I settled down to a new routine, much like the previous one but alone and with dreadfully melancholy moods especially during sunsets. It took me quite a while to come out of this depression and when I did it was to enter an altogether different phase in my life.

      In the mean time, and despite not feeling up to par, I did accomplish a few things for my own benefit. I tried to relate neurosis to what I was experiencing, but in this I did not do a good job. I had an explanation for the mess I was in but it did not mesh with what I knew about neurosis, which was mostly the left overs from my Freudian period at Kings. I mean, excess work was something that afflicted and killed Japanese, who have a name for it, but Freud had said nothing about such problems, unless you interpreted the fear of castration in a very latitudinarian sense as a father's early warning to his son that if he did not grow up to be a workaholic he would cut off his balls, and even the stupidest offspring could figure out that this constituted an empty threat.

      In lieu of further research into the conundrum, I chose to do some writing for myself instead of for the newspaper. My first short story was about the infliction of pain. The tale, titled "The Torturer", was an allegory about a being so powerful he maimed, killed, or spared the people around him, regardless of guilt or innocence, as if they were moths, which was how I got the inspiration, with a slight nudge from Kafka. It was published in a literary journal renowned for its witty typography and the designer had the brilliant idea of twisting the columns of the printed text--torturing it, get it?--which made my story impossible to read. Everybody in the literary world was amazed at his inventiveness, but I was understandably not amused.

      I wrote other stories, which were collected in a couple of books, but they were mostly projections of my own manias and not about to gain for me a breathless army of admirers, not even a platoon of empathetic neurotics. They tended to be long-winded and full of literary allusions, certainly not conceived to captivate a public whose tastes ran to Lobsang Rhampa (whoever he was, possibly the Dalai Lama's pseudonym), Dale Carnegie, and handbooks on astrology.

A highly acclaimed Marxist work suggests to me a storyboard for a Farmer Alfalfa cartoon

My stories were about individuals trying to escape society by making journeys to "nowhere" or doing interminable, useless inventories. In one I imagined a world ravaged by gamma-rays in which the sole survivor one day discovers an unexpected footprint, like Robinson Crusoe, but unlike this model he does not try to find out who made it before concluding he is about to be besieged by wild savages. The world for my characters was an unwelcome intrusion, which they dealt with either by cursing or retreating even further from it. I did try my hand occasionally at realism, but this amounted to admitting that society existed, which was not much of a concession.

      My most ambitious social statement consisted of an allegory about two grave-diggers--an obviously parodic rip-off of Becket's Waiting for Godot--in a cemetery near a vague war front. The differences in the sizes of the tombstones and funerary monuments stood for social inequalities and the cannonades in the background augured coming social upheavals. The plot also involved exploitation and brutality and an improbable love interest in the form of a young whore fleeing from a brothel, which, if I had really been honest, should have been the other way around. These images were meant to be revolutionary pronouncements, but my commie buddies found them less than inspiring. They pretended to prefer stories about peasants counting their ribs or mechanics who felt persecuted by spanners and screwdrivers. The latter motif was hailed by critics as a brilliant representation of the Marxist concept of alienation. I thought hard about this device and concluded it would make a good story board for a Farmer Alfalfa cartoon, but I did not make public my views, which was a good indication of how ambiguous my situation would be when I later entered the political fray. I was still deluding myself that a revolutionary firing squad was the way to go for an honest petit bourgeois intellectual like me, although this did not deter me from indulging in imagery about psychological crutches, like those I used in New York during my travails under the Apocrisiary, or in monologues in which I reconstructed, metaphorically, the estimate I gave him on how much he had spent on my education. He might have been in Europe, but I was still under his shadow, perhaps even his slave, and I was using literature as a substitute for realistic self-appraisal, which should have led me to conclude that I was, to put it mildly, unstable.

      Nevertheless, for some time yet I did as if I wasn't. I went on with my job at the newspaper as if nothing had happened, but I was slipping. I was under siege by what Burroughs in Yage Letters called "fear of stasis". And this was irrational because objectively I had a fairly promising career which I was hellbent on throwing away like a man in a lifeboat jettisoning compass and oars because he can do nothing about the currents. With Piney's consent I did a radio program in which I read essays on subjects so wide-ranging I cannot remember anything about them but for the detail that I once used the word horim, which refers to the sheathes some tribesmen use to hold up their penises as if they were in perpetual erection. Curiously, this leaves their testicles exposed, which is not good tactics in battle and probably shows that all they do is mock-fighting, except when they go head-hunting, but this, as I remember having read, they do on the stealth. I suppose I could recover the reason I employed that term and even reconstruct the entire article--I am sure it wasn't about tips on porno-film auditions--but I wasn't getting much fan mail then and I am sure I won't be turning the world on its head now, so I will drop the subject, as I dropped my radio program after about two months' worth of my unsparkling lectures into a wireless void.

      In the paper itself my attention was definitely flagging. I was not checking copy to censor what would wound Piney's sensibility, like other Rotarians speaking out of turn in their monthly food-fests. This did not happen but what did occur was a shoot out involving the judge who had made Piney's grandchildren bastards. Machote brought in the information and it was duly published. This got Piney's dander very high up but he grudgingly backed down when I honestly pleaded ignorance. However, unlike me, he was unforgiving and there soon arose between us further causes of friction and distrust.

      St Croix had been toeing the line in the international news section. He was particularly scrupulous about printing every body count from Vietnam, but he had been a busy little bee sneaking articles by his red cellmates into the op-ed section, which I never read and whose running my former rhymester boss had retained from his previous august position in the paper. These accidental collaborators were not writing anything very subversive--they mostly wanted to see their names in print--but some one told Piney and he began to get a very strong ratty smell which he was tracing directly to my office. I was not responsible for any of this--I am pretty certain it was the rhymester himself who blabbed and found a way to implicate me--but when Piney demanded explanations, suspecting St Croix would come in for it, I responded by asking what harm was being done. Now, any one with an iota of common sense knows that you do not answer a boss's question with another question, so what I was doing in effect was resigning, and though I could have sincerely said that wasn't my intention, it was as much my intention as it was the time I wanted to hurt Aryaca and told him in a wouldn't-hurt-a-fly deadpan to put a chastity belt on his wife. I was doing what my mind intended even if the words literally belied such an intention.

      The reason I could not acknowledge my real intention was more insidious than it superficially appeared. Even if I had wanted to come out and say: "Yes, you ignorant ball of turd, I am quitting", my mind knew I couldn't afford such openness because I needed to be fired in order to able to get a plump severance payment. What's more, there was the secret syllogism that even though my bonuses were not technically a salary, I knew that Piney knew that I would not accept dismissal without a legal fight for adequate compensation. The newspaper owner, and soon to be my former boss, might have been ignorant and full of shit, but he wasn't dumb, and after another brief bout of reciprocal questioning he left and ordered that I be liquidated not to the extent I expected but well enough for me to be able to afford a brand new single engine Piper aircraft with which I was sure I could leave that place and start a new career as an all-purposes pilot elsewhere. Juggy Moran got his pound of flesh after all, but he was left where he was, which was exactly nowhere. As to my commie friend, he knew his days at the paper were numbered and he quit for a job teaching journalism at the local university. Candice married again, to an engineer who had courted her before me--and was doing much better than at the time of his courtship--and the two had healthy children who grew up to be normal adults with successful careers.

      My first foray into the world had had ambiguous results. I hadn't done too badly at the newspaper, but the experience did not make me particularly proud and it had ended with a nervous breakdown. Apparently, the moral was to dip again but not get too involved, and that was what I thought I would be doing in the next phase of my life. I dipped alright but as to involvements I got more than I had bargained for.

I am drawn irresistibly to aviation watching my dumb friend Boris struggle with an ornery old Plymouth

Among the good moments of my unlamented hunting days was when I went on a flying trip to a distant river where dolphin bumped against boats and the caymans basked on sandy bars and would let us approach them as if we were friends, which we weren't. We flew in a large single-engine, big-bellied Cessna and during the flight I thought to myself that I could learn to pilot if I wanted to and that I really wanted to. I edged closer to piloting, even as I worked my way to the edge of my career as a hack, through two other experiences, one irrelevant to and the other inconsistent with flying.

      On one occasion I was travelling with a friend up a winding road in an old beat up Plymouth with a bad carburator. It wasn't getting the mix right and as we climbed and the oxygen got thinner the engine kept going dead. This happened at every turn when my friend, who was driving, had to ease up however slightly on the throttle. My friend's name was Boris and he was trustworthy and hard-working but he wouldn't have figured in a very long short-list for people likely to do well in an IQ test. His eventual choice of profession, the military, was I thought wise and he plodded on to the rank of colonel, when he was retired and afterwards got work as a bureaucrat. In the fulfillment of his military duties, Boris acquired anti-guerrilla field experience and he liked to tell stories of how he and his fellow officers sent each other gift-wrapped severed hands. He thought it was a riot and I thought it was better than exchanging penises and testicles which was in times past another way victors used to do body counts.

      Anyway, when we did our mountain trip his macabre gift ideas were still in the future and what I observed at that point in time was his not coping very well with the Plymouth's carburator problem. At a especially sharp curve in which the engine stopped and the car lost momentum and started sliding back and he was being slow in applying the brakes, I thought (all this in a fraction of an instant) that if somebody were coming behind us, which wasn't likely but still possible, we were going to get banged up pretty good and maybe even have our necks broken. So I told him, in a superior officer's tone of command, to move over and let me drive. I wasn't exactly sure what I could do but I knew it would be more than what he was doing. To my own surprise and inordinate self-admiration, by the second hairspin I had the problem solved by stepping simultaneously on the brake and the clutch thus allowing me to gun the engine when it would have tended to die. As I said, this was irrelevant to flying but for the argument that if I didn't let that old Plymouth get the better of me I surely could get the better of whatever difficulties flying could present. You could say that I took a down-to-earth approach to going up to the sky.

I was so nervous in an airplane I could actually induce panic in my fellow passengers, who once demanded they wanted re-assurances from the pilot

The other experience that led to my piloting career was that I was afraid of flying! This seeming inconsistency has various explanations, all of them to the effect that I was not really afraid of flying, so I will only use one of them, the strongest and most unassailable: I was not afraid of flying but afraid of dying which was what I thought could befall me inside a plane that was flying. The contemplation of this possibility derived in turn from two sources: one was my experience as an international news editor and the other one was my vivid imagination.

      Flying in our time has become so safe that it is hard to imagine the times when a crash a week surprised no one. In fact, flying, which even then was safer than driving, was so relatively unsafe that in one memorable accident two four-engine propeller-driven passenger planes sliced into each other over the Grand Canyon, which was as if two dune-buggies had accidentally crashed headlong after starting from opposite sides of the same dune, in the middle of the Sahara. Also, I was not about to forget the Queens accident during my School of Journalism days, in which two planes had been on the same approach path to Idlewild. I had been on duty in the newspaper when a Bolivian pilot in a P38 got his bearings confused and thought he had been cleared for take off straight into an airliner which had also been cleared for take off at the opposite end of the same runway.

      Then there was the sad fate of the Comets, which disintegrated in mid-air because of engine vibrations. It must have been a ghastly surprise for the unfortunate fliers to be separated from their meals by about 30,000 feet of empty space, not to mention the premonitory creakings prior to the actual crackings. And how about those Viscounts whose controls had a tendency to disengage leaving crew and passengers on a wild joy ride without a happy ending ahead? I mean, anything could happen once you got inside a plane and, even if the chances were you would eventually get off safe and sound, while I was on board my imagination could blot out everything but the sound of the engines which, as far as I knew (and I was right of course), could stop all of a sudden with the consequences that were to be expected. I was ignorant then about glide paths, but even if I hadn't been I am sure I would not have been reassured, and on this score at least I would have been correct, because there is no recorded instance in which an airliner lost all power and returned safely to earth on a glide path, usually unpaved and more significantly imaginary.

      I was so jittery in an airplane, and also so lucid about its potential for imminent destruction and death, I could talk fellow passengers into such a state of nervous apprehension they would get inordinately wide-eyed, repeatedly demanding that the stewardesses go and ask the pilot if everything was alright, which, considering their unfounded fears, was nothing compared to the pretentious Italian who asked to see the pilot because he was served shellfish. When I was alone without any one around I could drive into a state of acute panic, which had a tranquilizing effect on me, I soothed my nervousness by repeatedly going to the toilet resulting in that after an unusually exhausting voyage I had the emptiest bladder and the cleanest hands of any of my fellow passengers.

      As you will have deduced, apart from my neurotic obsession with tormenting others, my own fears stemmed from ignorance. Knowing more than what I was supposed to know as an ordinary passenger would hardly have prevented any of the disasters I imagined from befalling, but it would have gone some way to stilling my unreasoning fear that airplane engines could be as unresponsive as the motor of my Plymouth during the trip with Boris into the higher reaches of the cordillera. Thus it was I concluded that, if I gained nothing else, learning to pilot would contribute to making my trips on commercial flights less of a nuisance. When all is said and done, however, this was really a minor justification that took on major proportions because it seems so absurd. The really important reasons I wanted to pilot were that I liked the idea and that deep in my mind I was already making plans for a switch from journalism to another as yet undefined profession, even though when I began taking flying lessons I was only about the middle of the time I spent working in the newspaper.

      As it was piloting that became the second dip in my post-Apocrisiary existence, I think I should make an aside here to explain that, despite my strenous statements to the contrary, leaving the paper was not the end of my work as hack, a profession I would return to during my political phase but in circumstances which were completely different from those that led me to it as a means of survival. Also, to be precise about this new adventure towards another edge, I did not take the decision to make piloting a career until I was having inklings of desperation about my newspaper work, which was some time before the catastrophe which made me feel like a lame cat whose urgent need for stroking had been so insensitively rebuffed by my ex-wife. I am quite certain about these chronological estimates--even though I am also certain that the groundwork for most of the crucial junctures in my life have been laid sumbliminally--because it was the discipline and the fascination of flight that contributed to my recovery from the psychological devastation I underwent.

My instructor, bald Captain Sky, gets off doing tailspins with me by alleging the lame excuse that he had an urgent appointment with his barber

As to the period of my apprenticeship, I know it sounds unlikely but my flying instructor was called Sky, Ed "Captain" Sky to be precise. Despite the terrific ring to his name he did not wear a cape or tights and he was far from perfect. He was big, bald, and aging and he had a tendency to irritability, which he showed the time I asked him to help me interpret one of the New York Times weather maps with the spiky and the bubbly lines indicating cold and warm fronts and he tore it up and threw it in my face. He liked to regale his pupils with stories of how he had made possible the destruction of the German submarine fleet in the Caribbean by flying spotter for the USAF. I took him at his word and it was only after about the 400th retelling in my presence of all or part of his adventures that I began finding inconsistencies not attributable to hardening of the arteries (he wasn't that old) and concluded that as a war pilot he was a good story-teller, although his stories were not entirely invented and he was much less of a liar than many pilots I encountered afterwards.

      One time Sky got the idea I was flying scared and he took me up and flew at tree top level until, more to humour him than anything else, I said: "Wow", but despite this amazing demonstration of incredible derring-do, when I asked him if we could practice tailspins, he told me he had an urgent appointment with his barber. I did not give up on the tailspin idea and later I tried to get a veteran commercial pilot to practice the maneuver with me, but he developed a splitting headache en route to a designated area. As I was still only a student pilot, I was not sure why we couldn't stall the plane anywhere as long as we had sufficient altitude--I had the very clear understanding that if we didn't recover from the spin it would not make any difference if we were over rocks or a mountain of mattresses--but I took his word for it that he needed an aspirin urgently or he would be liable to fall into a coma.

      I never did practice tailspins, but I did stalls and chandelles and lazy eights and a lot of other maneuvers, none of which, exception made of a 620 degrees landing approach, did I ever have to use. In a chandelle, for instance, the pilot puts the plane into a sharp dive to pick up speed fast and then makes a sharp, quick turning ascent to an altitude above the one the plane had at the start of the maneuver. This was probably invented by a French pilot during a World War I dogfight. During my first solo chandelle I dived very quickly one thousand feet and very quickly recovered 500 until I saw I was doing about 30 knots and lost my nerve, luckily without Baron von Richthofen in front of me. Later I did better chandelles, but I concluded they would only come handy if I was fool enough to get trapped in a very narrow valley in the Himalayas. I must have come close to tailspinning on various occasions. One I can think of now--taking off from an airport near the center of Paramaribo, very overloaded at noon on a hot day--would have had unhealthful consequences for my passengers and me, not to mention unwary pedestrians below. But it never got to that and if it had I think I could have coped, but I wasn't raring to cope for the heck of it.

      My initial training was done in a Cessna 150, a two-seater with about the speed of my Dauphine (the Fiat 1100 was slightly faster), and much easier to control than the ornery Plymouth. Despite his intense dislike of weather maps, "Captain" Sky was very emphatic about the use of carburator heat. He explained that it could make the difference between safe flying and having to ditch or make an emergency landing with a frozen up engine, and warned me about the danger of humidity-laden clouds, which were the signal for using carburator heat, an innocent-looking lever all you had to do was pull back. He never actually used it when flying with me, so one time I was on a practice flight by myself and saw a tiny cumulus about ten miles away I immediately used carburator heat and got the scare of my early career as a pilot when the engine noise went down about two octaves and I thought it was quitting on me and I pushed the carburator heat control back to where it was before and headed home. That must have been about the time "Captain" Sky thought I needed training in tree-top level flying, but as that really wasn't the case either, I decided to consult some World War II flying manuals and discovered that engines did require carburator heat: when you were flying Super Fortresses on the edges of a really big thunderstorm about to lay a tornado, which was a situation I had to fear as much as hitting a stray canary.

My hero was the Japanese ace whose plane was badly shot up and he flew unconscious upside down back to his base (so he claimed)

One thing that "Captain" Sky did have right was that to make perfect three-point landings you had to gauge the height of the aircraft in relation to the ground before take off and keep your eyes on the runway horizon when bringing the plane down. As I was taller than the engine hood in the tiny Cessna I used, I had a tendency to look sideways at the runway when landing and this made from some noisy contacts with the tarmac until one of my fellow students reported I was trying to wreck the landing gear and I decided to take Sky's advice, after which most of my landings were adequately squishy.

      All of this is by way of saying that as a pilot I was no Saburo Sakai, the Japanese Zero ace who got pretty shot up in some naval battle in the Pacific Ocean and flew upside down unconscious back to his base (according to his memoirs anyway). My own flying vocation was more like that of Saint-Exupéry, the French pilot-author who was lost over the Mediterranean leading to the theory that, as no German claimed him as a score, he must have crashed while star gazing, a favorite form of entertainment he readily admitted to in one of his books. I was never an admirer of Saint-Exupéry the author. His most famous work, a children's book titled The Little Prince, is as entertaining as Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, the autobiography of a bird which is about the most excruciating abuse ever of the pathetic fallacy. But I had him in mind when years later I concluded it was time I gave up flying if I did not want to become a crêpe wrapped around a mahogany tree in the middle of some jungle.

      During my beginnings, I never gave a thought to the possibility of not going through with my training and I was so enthusiastic about planes and flying that I would put myself to sleep by going over the pre-flight checklist--for the Cessna 150 it took as long as a commercial pilot would in strapping himself into his seat--and thinking of the next day's flight plan. In fact, it was in this way that I finally rid myself of the insomnia I had gotten from reading too many French experimental novels. Also, as I became more adept at flying, I had some experiences that were splendiferous, barely this side of the religious-revelatory.

      The high point, both figuratively and literally, was the time I tested the altitude limit of the little plane I used. I had gotten over the carburator heat scare and I was paying less heed to "Captain" Sky's cautions and warnings, which included that I shouldn't go over 13,000 feet for approximately the same reason I would rue the day I did not use carburator heat, namely, I would be flying a heavy glider and not an airplane. Well, I didn't believe him this time and one day I took off and headed on about a 30 degree angle towards a line of mountains to the west. Obviously, I wasn't going very fast and by the time I approached these mountains I was still below their summits and decided to go higher. I was keeping a watch on the altimeter and checking the other instruments--there were only about five of them and basically I was simply dawdling and waiting expectantly for the engine to splutter--when I looked out and saw in the distance what looked like a snow-capped range that was way above any altitude my tiny plane would be capable of attaining. For a short while, I didn't know what was going on because the mountains I had originally targeted were not high enough for snow and they should have been below me and not above and in the distance, until I realized these were other peaks in another country far beyond my reach. I gazed at them in amazement for a short while and turned back and started descending, for I did not want to undergo the fate of the feline frozen in Kilimanjaro inspiring in Hemingway a famous flight of rhapsodic symbolization.

      That day so long ago it seems as if it had been in another life I felt a kind of exaltation that can only be described as other-wordly. I had also proven that "Captain" Sky was not the know-it-all he pretended to be, but I still liked the guy even if the best he could muster for my short stories was a condescending smile. I liked him even more when I got my second instructor after Sky's monopoly on flying lessons at the airport was broken, for the newcomer was "Major" John Noneck, a swarthy runt on the make whose idea of teaching was doing cross-country trips during which the only thing I learned was, cruising over a motorway, how slow the Cessna 150 flew, and he got paid for every hour I squandered under his unhelpful tutorship.

Due to my bad left eye, I am fooled into believing that Kandinsky designed the depth perception test, but the understanding eye doctor passes me anyway

I think I owe the reader some background information at this point. The most important one has to do with how I got a student-pilot's license and later my pilot's licenses with the birth-given quiver in my left eye, which I have compared to Sartre's eye problem. This was an exaggeration for all I had was an asymmetry between eyes, which is true of every one, but mine was more pronounced and it had to do with reduced vision in the left eye and an occasional near-imperceptible tic. The difference in vision between the two eyes was in the order of 4 to 1 and this might seem at first considerable but it didn't make much difference during my examination in all but two tests: seeing with the unaided left eye, obviously, and depth perception.

      When the eye doctor began my examination I was frankly fearful. My insecurity became a big funk when I passed the right-eye test with flying colours and he proceeded to do the left eye. I was so nervous I almost fumbled the topmost three letters which were about the size of the Arc de Triomphe, but he apparently was very satisfied for, to my utter dread, he moved the pointer straight down to the very last line, where all I saw was a blurry uninterrupted file of infinitesimal ants. I first tried: "duh..er..ah" to see if by some miracle I hit it, but upon his glacial silence to my incoherent letter-like sounds I had to come clean.

      He was not indignant and merely tried to find out how far down the lines of gobbledygook I could go with assurance, which was only about two to three levels. Since he did not eject me from his office as a contemptible fraud--although I suspected it could have been that he wanted payment in full before flunking me--hope returned and it strengthened as I kept passing tests like skipping sidewalk squares, until he showed me an abstract composition in which I had to pick out some object and all I could see was an undecipherable and ominous jumble. The examiner said that was the depth perception test. Again I thought my flying career was being aborted but again he went on with his annoying tests. The most difficult one was standing like a blind stork on one leg, but I did it, and the most useless one--since he and I had been speaking to each other for the better part of half an hour without any noticeable difficulties--was the diapason he played away from each one of my ears to see if I could catch its fine changes in pitch, which I easily did. The only purpose for this exam was, it seemed to me, to determine if a pilot could diagnose the sound of an engine before a possible coughing fit.

      Anyway, I had no idea how my case stood when we finally sat down face to face across his desk. This ophthalmologist turned out to be an understanding person and he apparently had concluded that, as I had not been stumbling against the furniture in his small office, I probably could estimate distances well enough to tell the difference between a runway and a garage entrance. He was not entirely right, as I will presently confess, but the important thing was that he had passed me, although I was still so tense that when I got up to leave I turned around like a proto-type robot and bumped with a loud knock against the partition behind me. It was too late for him to have second thoughts, but he did warn me not to try to fly professionally, a piece of advice I took no heed of, in fact obliterated thoroughly from my mind. I should add that I am quite capable of good depth perception even if I did not do well with the doctor's abstract-expressionist cartoon, which is just a common case of functional compensation, like the one-eyed driver I once had who could shift three and four lanes in a twinkle in the middle of rushing heavy traffic, which meant his one good eye was also doing the work of the missing one.

      With all the hours of uninstructive flying time I had accumulated under Noneck--the cross-country flights we did together were chiefly to allow him to visit his family in another city--I was soon ready to take the practical exam for a pilot's license. My ground schooling was much superior to my in-the-air instruction and I had learned to use the different devices for calculating velocities and headings and ETA's and all the rest. I was a whiz at these tasks, which never in practice yielded precise results, but their basic implications were learned well enough. They were, well, basic. A strong cross wind could force you to land on one wheel, or it could take you seriously off course, like the time I was heading north to some islands called The Rocks and would have wound up in mid-Caribbean if I hadn't glimpsed some other rocks to the west I identified with the help of a map, which was where I got off my spectacularly miscalculated heading. On the other hand, a strong head wind could slow you up a lot, like the time I underestimated a flight's duration so badly I arrived at my destination at night (which was my totally unforeseen introduction to night flying) or when I was heading to the old airport near St. George's in Grenada, then under a pro-Castro regime, and a trade wind reduced my speed to nearly zero and the tower kept asking me where I was and I kept saying: "Give me ten minutes", and when I landed there was a platoon of hulking soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs waiting for me. Much more needs to be said on this incident, which was a marker in my drift into politics.

When asked by my examiner to do a tricky landing, I tell him: "You do it", a bad career move I manage to get away with

I also took with ease to navigational aids. With the ADF you tuned into a radio station and the needle showed you the direction to it, which meant you could ignore it if you were headed elsewhere and use it only to get your approximate position. The ADF had substituted the loop antenna which pilots used in the late stone age to get a Morse-code signal identifying stations, probably the real reason for the unnecessary tuning-fork exercise at the ophthalmologist's. With the VOR you chose a radial to a destination and kept the needle in the center and depending on whether the radial was inbound or outbound you had to turn with or against the direction of the needle to maintain your heading. I am not trying to be pedantic here but briefly to show I was a responsible learner, which needs to be emphasized in order that it be understood that I knew what I was doing as a pilot later on (most of the time anyway).

      One more thing needs to be said and it is that my training was going on even as I laboured in the newspaper. There was no conflict in the scheduling of my time because, as my work was mostly in the afternoon and at night, I had mornings to myself. However, as my disinterest in journalism grew, I would cut into my working time, another reason Piney smelled a rat and we had the confrontation which put an end to my days slaving for him. 

      By the time my pilot's license examination came around, I had switched from the smaller Cessna to a Cessna 172, a plane not much different from the other one but with greater performance capabilities, like travelling faster than my Fiat 1100 but much less than my Starfire, which I could gun easily to over 150 mph. To be quite honest, I wasn't prepared for the flying test and I would have been flunked, but for a take-charge attitude I assumed when I began to despair of doing anything right. The most glaring show of unpreparedness was when the examiner told me to do turns with a 60-degree bank and the damn Cessna kept wanting to spiral downwards and I had to pull hard on the wheel to level out. About the third time I was experiencing difficulties, I saw the examiner going for the command and told him firmly to lay off. After that, I struggled with the plane and managed to complete a couple of 360-degree turns without losing altitude.

      The next deficiency was a trap he set for me. The thing about high-wing Cessnas is that they are indeed like gliders and unless you idle the engine and refrain from spreading the flaps and jump up and down on your seat they are almost impossible to land on a short base-leg approach, which can be compared to going at 100 mph in a car and realizing you're out of gas as you speed by a service station. My sneaky examiner pretended that I set down the Cessna with full power, without flaps, on a 180-degree emergency landing pattern, which I knew was impossible and said: "You do it", another normally unadviseable career move. Well, he actually did, at the speed of light, which meant the plane's wheels barely hit the runway before he had to take it up again. We both knew that this had been the equivalent of a trick question and when we returned to base from the area where the test had taken place the examiner deplored my unbrilliant performance, but, since he liked my hands-on, can-do attitude, he decided to pass me anyway on condition I took more lessons.

      Not too long after that, I bought my Piper six-seater and I spent six months training day and night until I could fly it and land it blindfolded and knew it inside and out so well that even now, decades since that time, I think I could still take it for a spin without even bothering with a checklist. I was all set and ready to fly for any one any time anywhere at going rates, but there were two ways of going about this: sitting around the aeroclub where I had learned to fly or going elsewhere. The first option was not very promising, because there weren't that many tourist attractions in the vicinity--in fact none that were famous--and the people who would have needed my services for travelling in the region either couldn't afford them or already had their own planes. The obvious next step was then to move along and the question was where.

      I am just doing a narrative-timing thing here, because, even before I had fulfilled all the requirements for a commercial pilot's license, even before buying my plane, I had already heard of the Lost World and the Tepuys and the world's highest waterfall in southeastern Costaguana and that sounded about right for me. The country was stable, it's currency was strong, and it was encouraging tourism. Most importantly, because I didn't want a lot of hassle, competition was light. This could mean I would not be in the business to get rich, if the absence of competition denoted lack of demand, but also that, if I met my costs (the plane wasn't fully paid up) and I earned a half-decent living, I could have a plausibly pleasurable way of life. As it turned out, demand was not that big, but there was some; and for a time there were few complications. Usually I just sat around fanning myself or reading Agatha Christie, but I had a phone and I had plastered my name any where they let me that tourists visited (even to flyers in hotel rooms) and now and again some one called asking and I usually managed to talk myself up a few clients a month. 

Flying over Devlin Fall would have given Mr Heevie-Jeevies the screaming meemies

The Lost World was a plateau made from a huge ancient stone--and by ancient I mean the beginning of Earth's history--on whose edges were the Tepuys and waterfalls and the cut off to the jungle. It was best seen from the air, for on the ground you couldn't travel without a tankload of insect repellent. The soil was so thin on the surface--the place was as good for agriculture as a swarm of locusts--that wheel tracks lasted forever. In that sense it was like a tundra near the Equator. The Tepuys were flat-top mountains. Striking from a distance, they were so pitholed that walking on them was like riding waves of spiky, dark rock. Their remoteness and inaccessibility had given a third-rate scriptwriter the idea for a haunt of relict dinosaurs, precisely in the place where they would probably have first been extinguished, for prey was so scarce on the ground that the Lost World, which constituted the greater part of the region of Guianna, was profuse only in blood-thirsty mosquitoes feeding on each other.

      It was from the edge of one of the Tepuys, inside an immense, yawning canyon of jungle, that water cascaded 5,000 feet down to the valley floor. The waterfall, discovered by a pilot named Devlin who drank himself to death, was no Niagara--although up close it had a substantial flow--and much more impressive was the way the entire table top exuded water from its upper edges, which made its sides shine with the slime collected over millions of years. The effect was not unlike Baudelaire's rotting dog carcass in Les fleurs du mal. Devlin's suicidal behaviour could explain why he would be flying inside the Tepuys for no reason other than his own delectation.

      The best run and the one that usually won me plaudits consisted in approaching the Devlin's Fall Tepuy from the north, where it only sloped down, and then fly over it at a very low altitude so that the tourists could see the horizon of ugly, black rock and the line where it ended, and then crossing that line above the waterfall and into the canyon, which was a spectacular drop that would have given Mr Heevie Jeevies, my agoraphobic art instructor at Kings, the screaming meemies. These trips produced sufficient for me to break even (with an adjustable personal salary) and I had no reason to complain. I could have done much better if I had been willing to do the gold and the diamond mines on a regular basis, but I had flown over them and seen the wrecks strewn around the muddy airfields next to dark-brown contaminated rivers, whose water you drank only if you were tired of living, and the settlements, which from the air looked like unsold inventory in a dirty brick factory--on the ground they were like being inside a kiln--and that put me off, except when I was really desperate for income and then I only flew to places where the worst danger I faced was not having enough runway to unstick the wheels from the mud, which might have required waiting for it to dry. Rates for those trips were higher because after them I always had the plane decontaminated.

      Fortunately, when things were starting to get bleak, I found myself a group of regular clients from Maracas, the Costaguanan capital, who were trying to start a cattle ranch in an area so far from anywhere even the local Amerindians, a tribe called Panare, said rotting in hell would be better than living there, or so some one translated what they kept saying when they saw strangers. The Panare had been written up by the British anthropologist Jake Flinty, who thought they were not environmentally friendly and decided he much preferred doing a study on contemporary Costaguanans as a group, which he found even more primitive than the Panare. Flinty's lordly approach to his subjects got him a chair in Oxbridge, a famous center of learning in Middlesex, and the right to review all books on anthropology that were sent to the TLS.

      One of the Panare's reasons for their discontent may have been that they were not really local but had been evicted from their ancestral lands by the Guianna Corporation, a huge government boondoggle that, after losing billions (of dollars, that is) producing low-quality steel nobody would buy, decided to lose still more billions processing aluminium it wasn't able to sell. That, however, was none of my look out, not at that point anyway.

      My clients had probably not seen a cow up close and I never understood why they kept going to that wilderness, which, though part of Guianna, was to the west of The Lost World and the Tepuys and had nothing scenic to recommend it. Yet they had raised a fence along twenty kilometers of a dirt road that ended at a mammoth jungle and were claiming all the land as far as a very distant line of mountains known by the sinister name of Blow-Pipe, which made them "proprietors" of something like Texas or more aptly the Sahel during strong drought conditions. The Panare's lament was entirely justified as the prospective ranchers would soon discover.

      The partners were a disparate bunch. I had met them by chance one day I was hanging around waiting for a passenger in the Maicara airport and they happened to go there to enquire about local air transportation services and I happened to be that. To me, the sucker was a guy called Bernie because it was his Nissan four-wheel drive they used to visit their "ranch". He was middling size with a tendency to stocky. I noticed that his lower shanks were about three times as thick as his wrists. He was that side of balding and had a mustache. We became friendly because he talked almost incessantly, making constant attempts at comedy and satire. He seemed prey to an uncontainable nervous energy, which he could disguise only with a visible effort suggesting he was always on the edge of freaking out. Normally, I too am talkative, but Bernie beat me hands down, so I let him talk, and talk he did till I could claim I knew him almost like myself, which is an arrant lie because I knew about myself as much as the Trojans knew about wooden horses. The one subject on which Bernie deferred to me was on flying and when he paused and I could put in two cents' worth he listened intently but it was obvious he was impatient to intervene. He had theories on everything under the sun, which I, who am naturally disputatious, disputed, and this set off long discussions between us in which we were like Kafka's two clowns in The Castle.

My Piper becomes the object of a cargo cult for the local Amerindians, who propitiate it with enormous quantities of black beans

The free-loader in my view was Ernie, who made a fortune under development-economics guidelines. He manufactured the radiators for the cars the local workers re-assembled after they had been disassembled in Detroit. The superfluous radiators presumably were inventoried. This process constituted a theoretical labyrinth even Engels, who slavishly pancaked Marx's imbecilities, wouldn't have found his way through. I saw Ernie at work once we went to a whorehouse in Maicara--you may deduce from this that after my marriage I had reverted to my earlier habits in The Republic--and he was panting for an admittedly good-looking whore and he convinced Bernie, with whom he was rooming at a flea-bag (more accurately a cockroach-farm), to get himself one also and go to their room. I wouldn't have given a dime for the broad Bernie was stuck with and I don't imagine he had as good a night as Ernie, although he never told me anything.

      Bernie and his pals had traced out a small strip with a gentle slope in the reddish hardscrabble terrain and that's where I would fly them when they called and asked me to meet them at the Maicara airport. I usually flew low over the Panare village and the Amerindians made my Piper the object of a cult which they propitiated with bags of black beans. I thought they were making a great sacrifice until the local beer baron, and the most popular man in a 100-mile radius, explained that some government Indian "specialist" had sent a ton of the stuff to aid the Panare in settling down, but the latter didn't know what black beans were for and after exhausting all possible uses for them, including as chips in their version of poker, they kept them for just such an occasion as my airplane presented, which was obviously just desperate and unavailing clutching at straws. 

      We must have made about twenty trips to the unlikely cattle spread. Despite the desolation, at night, when we slept under a zinc roof and four uprights without walls, it was cool, the sky was splendid, and the distant Blow-Pipe mountains looked mysterious and a little threatening, especially when the Panares beat hollowed-out logs and lamented their sad destiny. The partners eventually stopped coming and abandoned the barbed wire fence and their shabby excuse for a shelter. Bernie had already told me that, according to an analysis he had commissioned, the soil was so poor if he was crazy enough to use it for grazing, cattle would develop rickets and their legs would crack under their own weight, which made him understandably downbeat about the whole enterprise and he took his car back to Maracas, showing he was not the complete sucker I thought but earning for him the undying hatred of Ernie, who was the only one in the group wanting to carry on because of the good times he was having at the whorehouse.

      Even before the demise of the ranch, Bernie had availed himself of my services for tourism independently of my collective employ by the group. On such trips I picked him up at the Maracas international airport, located in a coastal area called Maquita. If I had to stay overnight, I parked my Piper in the hangar of a company called Taven, run by a guy called Meca (no relation to the Dynast in The Republic) and his wife, a large dusky lovely called Trina. Meca was of the barnstorming school of mechanics. Unfortunately, we were in the Concorde-age and his skills, though impressive in getting even washing machines to fly, did not include reading circulars from companies such as Lycoming, which manufactured many of the engines he was supposed to be maintaining. This would eventually have near-fatal consequences for me...but I fear I am getting ahead of my story, a habit I foreswore when I undertook the second part of these memoirs.

      One day old Bernie showed up with a pathetic-looking broad for a trip he had planned with me. That day even the hired hands at Meca's shop looked at Bernie as if he were a beetle. Even he seemed embarrassed. As he later confided, he had invited the woman in a very dark bar and he had been surprised when he had seen her the next day, but he did not have the heart to ditch her.

      We left anyway and we had a good trip, which consisted in following the course of the Norico river from south of Maicara (most cities' names in Costaguana start with "Ma") to its delta on the Atlantic Ocean. We flew on a variable slope from altitudes as low as twenty feet over the river to as high as one thousand feet when the view justified it. It was in the middle of the dry season and the days were sunny and clear and we could see so far it was like floating over an immense bowl made by the creases of mountains in the far distances. We slept over in Guianna City, which was my base, and next day did the rest of the river and the delta, which is classic in its shape and its many branches. Some of these we followed for long stretches hopping from one to another until we reached the ocean over which we gained some altitude and flew the coastlines as far as Tribago and returned to sleep in Maturin, where we got very drunk and Bernie became romantic with his whore, who wasn't that ugly, more as if she was undernourished.

"Dr Schweitzer" abandons his charges, who were too confused by the water closets to notice, and decides to make money while drinking himself to death

Another time, I took Bernie and a friend and his wife to the Costaguanan Amazonas and that too was so pleasant I took a few undue risks, which luckily we survived. This region, huge but sparsely populated, would have made the back of the beyond seem like a portable loo. There were no roads to it or within it. It was, in fact, south of the jungle which was the terminus of the road on which Bernie and his chums had planned to undernourish cows. It was further separated from the rest of Costaguana by a line of soaring table tops and peaks that seemed to have gone stray from Guianna. The particular region we visited was a large savannah with swampy patches south of those elevations, bounded on all other sides either by other remote mountain ranges or by rivers and jungles. It was separated from the Norico by a chain of peaks where if you went down the chances of rescue were worse than the chances of survival.

      There were air strips here and there, from above like tiny mowed patches of savannah showing the rough, pebbly ground. They had sprung up originally in the mind of a possibly demented bureaucrat, but they were convenient for the adventurous flyer. Two at least were improved surface and long. One of these had been built--I imagine with machinery brought in the hold of large military transport planes--at the foot of a 10,000-foot peak that had cool, crystal-clear water with a dark, yellowish tinge coming down in falls and streams and forming pools before it flowed into a river next to which the airfield had been levelled. Most strips, however, were useless and once or twice I landed at Bernie's instigation--he bubbled with enthusiasm--to find ourselves in the middle of dry, scrubby, ominously silent savannah. If I had had a flat, we could have ended up feeling like Evelyn Waugh's anti-hero in Vile Bodies. I would anyway, because Bernie seemed to relish the idea of getting as fas as possible from civilization. He had told me he wasn't happily married and the situation during the Amazonas trip was as if his friend was trying to fob his own wife on him. It was very odd and not entirely to my satisfaction--maybe because the woman wasn't half bad and I wouldn't have minded having her--but I was getting paid handsomely and I wasn't being encouraged to pry.

      The metropolis in the region was a ready-made village with a water tower and an airstrip long enough to accomodate large jets. The Amerindians had taken over the houses meant for settlers who never volunteered. It was reported the people chosen to move there had said they would rather be fed to the lions in the Maracas zoo, which were not well provided for. The Indians used the toilet bowls as water deposits. They couldn't understand why some fool had devised the system whereby water first collected at the back, then was flushed down to the front, as it was as drinkable in one place as in the other.

      A shrivelled, white-haired Spaniard, who said he was a physician, functioned as headman. I was thirstying for a drink--during my time in the wilds I had been gradually developing a strong taste for Scotch--but our host was all out of it. I thought of Dr. Schweitzer and of how admirable it was to have such will power and to dedicate your life to ministering to the health of the few natives in that miserable excuse for a hamlet in an open-air oven. To be quite frank, I had that thought but I didn't believe it and the Spaniard did not elucidate for us the mystery of his being there.

      On a later trip to the capital of Amazonas, on the Norico, I found that the Spanish Schweitzer was running a very succesful bar and discothèque. When I went there he was pie-eyed but not enough that he couldn't observe my puzzlement, and he explained, in the jovial manner of a man who had found long-sought contentment, that his permanence in the village of the damned was a subterfuge he had used to save money and tend to his much-abused liver. When he had recovered enough, he concluded that, since he was going to go on drinking anyway, he might as well make money doing it. I thought the man was a genius, though not likely a good candidate for life-insurance, which he probably didn't need, unless he wanted to make a bottle of whisky his beneficiary.

      The trip this time was being paid by a magazine which was sending a photographer to take pictures of that remote region. Bernie got me the job, but he himself didn't go along. The photographer, Molino, a white-maned fiftyish individual who wore dark glasses and looked like a don, or a pimp, didn't feel too comfortable in my single-engine craft, so he hitched a ride on an Aerocommander belonging to the local authorities and piloted by a cocky Filipino. Don't ask me how he got there. Costaguana was just that sort of place. As I was still earning my pay from the magazine whatever the photographer did, I tagged along with a guide when the Aerocommander took off in the general direction of the Norico's sources, still very far away, but really just more jungle.

      We went as far as the Filipino pilot in his Aerocommander to make sure the photographer got his takes. We flew over jungle and river and landed near Catholic missions--the American Protestants had their own planes and were not friendly to intruders--and when we returned I flew at the level of low-lying clouds which I traversed deliberately to splash rain on the windshield and wash my little plane. It was a terrific flight with the sunlight falling in swathes through the clouds and everything finely etched and bright as far as one could see.

      Above the cumuli there was a high, thin overcast, and when we landed the Aerocommander had not arrived even though we had taken off at the same time. After about half an hour, it finally appeared and landed. Molino got off and stumbled towards me with a bottle of Scotch in one hand complaining loudly that the "crazy pilot" had got lost and couldn't see the ground and had finally made like a corkscrew through a hole in the cover at which point the photographer had decided to get drunk to make the certain death he was facing less painful. I took him back to Maracas and this time he seemed positively fond of my little craft.

While I specialized in smuggling color TV sets, Bernie was having erection problems with a married woman he loved passionately

I have to speak some more of Bernie if only because he was instrumental in two important changes in my life. During the time I knew him I learned a lot about the external facts of his life, because his volubility did not normally extend to his intimacies. This was a distance-maker and I cannot say that our friendship was more than superficial.

      The most striking thing about him was his scrupulousness about money, which was like a guilt complex. But even as I say this, I know I am being unfair: he did know a great deal and he was very sensitive in a robust way, although he was also sensititive in a sickly manner. He appeared to be enjoying himself and he spent money hand over fist, but any idiot could tell he was dissatisfied and heading for bankruptcy. His money was inherited and he had no intention of doing anything in life other than trying to keep it from evaporating, which means that he lived in a sort of quandary.

      I didn't even have to guess at his dissatisfaction because he confessed to me--he must have been really plastered--that he was passionately in love with a married woman with whom he was having trouble getting erections, and if that's not a hell of a spot to be in I don't know what it is to have problems. Whichever I might have had, I knew I didn't want to be in his shoes. I concluded that he was one confused dude, but then, I thought to myself, aren't we all, which is not true either, and what I really thought was that I did not give a damn what happened to Bernie.

      Though he probably didn't give a damn what happened to me either, he did have something to do with what did happen: he introduced me to his cousin, over whom I was to become exceedingly moony; and through her, I re-connected with journalism and connected with lefties, although she herself was not a lefty and knew them only because of her work as showbiz gossip. As to Bernie, he did get involved with the wife of the man who accompanied him to Amazonas and this affair, though not profound, resulted in his separation and subsequent divorce from his wife. I learned this from occasional encounters with him at night--we were usually both drunk--but then I lost track and the last I heard he had re-married and was living in another country.

      Bernie knew about Taven and it was through him that I began parking my plane there and finally decided to transfer operations entirely to Maquita, which was on the Caribbean with the Minor Antilles to the east forming an arc that curved from Guyana to Hispaniola. This arc was safely within range of my plane. Any closer fit would have involved the real risk of ditching on a direct flight from Maquita to Santo Domingo. It would have been like telling ATC I was bound for Guadaloupe but more likely to fall into the sea.

      I could have parked my Piper in a part of the airport reserved for general aviation and taken it to Taven for maintenance, but I came to an agreement with Meca and Trina that I would be given any work that came up in exchange for which, apart from parking fees and maintenance, I would also pay them a percentage of what I charged clients. This was acceptable because rates there were much higer than in Guianna. This agreement did not include jobs I hustled on my own, because Meca was not giving me any discounts on the services Taven provided. All in all, I had no right to complain: there was a lot of work, flights were booked in advance, and I did not have to be hanging around the airport waiting for clients. Additionally, the tendency as time passed was towards more work and at the end of my piloting career I was logging more flying time than an airline pilot, but this, as I shall explain, was not all to the good.

      Most of the flights I made were to New Sparta, one of the Minor Antilles off the eastern coast of the country, which had been converted into a shambolic duty-free zone, hardly Spartan then. I took people there mostly to shop, especially to smuggle back color television sets. This sounds absurd, I know, but I must remind the reader of exactly where we are. The country was swimming in oil, like The Republic but on a larger scale, and the people had elected a man who talked like Lenin with a winking fit. He used to say he was "a social democrat, yes, a socialist, to the day I die", but he winked so much that the rich understood he was a damned hypocrite and the populace understood he was going to give them hand outs. However, once in power he didn't want to seem too hypocritical so he clamped down on color television sets, as if they were the acme of decadent and callous consumerism, and would not allow them into the country even from the duty-free zone he himself had created.

      There were various ways of getting around this inherently absurd prohibition. The main one was bribing officials in "outbound customs"--one of the countless forms of "popular handouts"--but this had an element of chance because customs employees were careful not to take bribes from people who did not look stupid enough to ignore what corruption was and knew that a bribe was not just a form of duty cancelled in species. Another trick was to give the box containing the TV set directly to suborned airline handlers. The artifice I used was to load up directly from the terminal where I had already filed a flight plan to any island in the Caribbean, but once in the air I cancelled the previous flight plan and announced Maquita as my destination. The system was made to order for cheating: apart from accepting in board flight plans, there was no coordination between tower and customs and nobody checked you out in Maquita. The general tendency in the country was to alcoholism, because the soberheads were dumdums busily devising ways to ruin it, and they were doing it according to strict development-economics guidelines, perhaps with a slight excess of zeal. And let it be perfectly clear that these morons were doing their thing with an express mandate from the public.

I fall in love with Gina even as I suspect she might have been a common slut and alarms go off in my brain saying: "Pussywhip! Pussywhip!"

There were many other island destinations in the Caribbean and I went to all of them and beyond. This was the time of my trip to Paramaribo, after which I could have said of every plane that went into a spin and never recovered: "There but for fortune..." On that trip, I had a full complement of passengers on board and each one had bought a ton of wooden carvings supposedly made by the descendants of blacks who a long time ago had fled slavery and gone back to tribalism in the interior of the country. More likely they were carved in some urban shop by Indians (from India, not Amerindians) working the tourist trade in the hotels. These carved boards were made from mahogany and had veggie-like motifs. They were on a par in value with the millions of fake icons that Russians made to satisfy the inexhaustible diplomatic craving for rubbish. With our heavy load of rubbish, then, we barely managed to take off and for a very long time my little plane seemed to be climbing at approximately ten feet per minute and I had to maneuver--very gradually, let me tell you--to avoid a medium-sized TV relay antenna in the suburbs of Paramaribo. Fortunately, after a couple of thousand feet, things improved--the air was cool and thicker--and after we reached 10,000 feet, the rest of the trip was easy.

      Long trips like that one--Paramaribo to Maquita took five and a half hours, which was long for me--were not the rule, but I did have clients who had to make them, like the guy who knew about fishes only that he liked eating them and went into the fishing business because the government was offering incentives for exports at the same time it was subsidizing the price for fish in Costaguana itself. It was all very fishy, but my customer was not complaining and neither was I, who took him to Martinique every time he sent a shipment of fish. In his business all he had to do was cover his costs at home, even a small deficit was acceptable, as long as he could present proof of export, upon which he was rewarded with a truckload of dollars. The scheme was so blatantly incoherent that a dim light finally came on in some bureaucrat's brain and the export-incentivation program was cancelled and my client's business went down the drain-pipes and so did my trips to Martinique, not, however, before I took my new girl friend there as a kind of engagement present.

      I am referring to Gina, Bernie's cousin. When we were introduced one of those nights he and I met on the town, she was married and I was in a relationship that felt like a choke collar. She was extremely good-looking and had a well-rounded figure with the only relative defect being that her legs could have been somewhat less thin. She wore her hair short but this was immaterial as her (to me) perfect features--large almond-shaped eyes, shapely nose with a tiny snub, thin lips with an unmistakably sensuous pout--would have enhanced any hair style. The night we met her husband was not around and she flirted so openly with me I could imagine the way she would look after orgasm: a tinge of rose in her pale cheeks, make up vanished, the fuzz on her lips like nerve ends. The second time we met, in a disco, she was with her husband and I was with my girl friend and when they went dancing I went close to Gina and told her in the ear: "I'd love to suck all your birthmarks", of which there were two strategically placed on her face and, as they say, where there's smoke there's fire. As I was not sure about her reaction and at that point all I wanted was to express my desire, I wasn't too surprised by her complicit smile and I became exhilarated only afterwards.

      If I were asked about love at first sight I wouldn't know how to answer. In my experience I had known it: witness Carmen and Fanny. I could also get hot under the collar about a woman I saw in the street who really attracted me. In such cases, I stared without regard for politeness. But would love last after I had met the object of my sudden veneration? That I did not know, and I knew that love, real deep love, was an infrequent emotion in me, perhaps ultimately unreachable.

      With Gina what I felt seemed not only like love but also like passion, and the fact that she was married and that we were committing adultery added piquancy to the relationship, for it was shortly after the night I have just referred to that she and I made love. We did it in a motel for such as we were--basically, with a kind of toll booth where you got a key and where after you settled your bill--and for me it was like a night with one of the whores in the Acropolis. Gina did nothing to conceal her sexual expertise and I did not pause to ask myself questions. Her speciality was what she called a "black kiss" and she not only performed it on me but said she was going to do it, which made the act doubly or trebly impudent. Even as I use the word "impudent", I feel as if I were getting into a maze, because it wasn't as if I didn't know what a black kiss was and if so then I knew I was laying a woman with a lot of experience behind her, what is commonly called a whore, or more poltely a slut, even if she was married, and Bernie's cousin, and this knowledge notwithstanding I felt I was falling more and more in "love" and this had to mean that love was just plain desire and alarms were going off in my brain that sounded like "pussywhip pussywhip pussywhip", which portended nothing good.

I was like a lion wanting to be caged with a lioness who might have been waiting for a chance to escape

If trouble was to come, however, it seemed to me it would be in some indefinite future, and my Gina-romance got off to a fantastic start. There were things that needed explaining and practical matters to deal with. I wasn't about to brace Gina on where she had learned to black-kiss. Apart from intrusive it was a silly question she could have shot down in many ways, most efficaciously perhaps by asking: "Did you like it?", which would have been like asking an Indian: "Do you like curry?" As I had indeed liked it, I told myself that a good ass-licking was the natural thing to do in the heat of passion. This meant that Gina was a passionate woman, and I could attest to that, for hadn't she taken passionately to me? I had a problem with that. But could I imagine myself going to her and asking: "Why do you like me so much?" She could have shot back: "Why? Aren't you used to being liked?" "Well, yes...but, you see, with that thing you...sort of did...to me, I mean...I only have it when I go to cathouses?", upon which she could have responded: "You go to cathouses?" Or "Don't you like getting it for free?" And in the worst of all possible scenarios: "Who do you think I am anyway? Miss Virginity?" Or: "What? You think I was saving my virginity for you?" No, there definitely were too many complications, so I took the path of less resistance: Gina liked screwing, she did a lot of screwing, she knew all there was to screwing, and as to me, the best I could do would be to screw her and enjoy doing it.

      I might have gone a bit overboard when I indulged myself in images of Gina screwing every man she met or doing it to various men at once, like Nilda (who actually had done it sequentially), which was like watching a porno film and having the star in the flesh in bed. And that, I thought, was probably not far from the facts, because in the circles she moved in professionally, who knew if there weren't tapes of her fucking her head off with some actor or singer?, for as to photographs, I was certain there were entire albums of her in all conceivable acts and poses circulating among her male acquaintances, and, who was to say?, even among gorgeous lesbians. This was thrilling and my orgasms with Gina were a definite improvement over my next-previous sexual encounters, but this great fantasizing was predicated on Gina's "passion" for me and on our good sexual co-ordination and it would later come to haunt me when circumstances changed, as all things in life tend to do.

      On the practical side, I got my choke collar off, which wasn't hard, because my friend was an actual whore with good manners--this meant she used ASL to specify the male-member size she liked, instead of actually describing it--but this circumspection did not justify the coziness and domesticity that was coming between us and it reminded me of a marriage she told me she had been in which ended when she got bored of being a wife to a man with less ardours that she experienced and started laying anybody who even brushed past their apartment. Our parting, in sum, was friendly.

      Another practical question, as I saw it, was Gina's marriage, but there were ambiguities here. Although she seemed to be enjoying our relationship, I was the keener of the two. I might have assumed that she wanted out of her marriage and that our nuptials would be a natural follow up. I don't remember making an issue of marriage and when it did come up I got the surprise of my life. I was like a lion wanting to be caged with a lioness who might have been waiting for a chance to escape. I don't even remember why I wanted to marry, because I was having a great time during our adulterous affair. I was secretly engaged to an adulterous slut and I was going whopee! But as usual with me, I could not let things be and had to go to extremes.

      This was about the time I began going on hunting trips with Gina's slovenly father and her environmentally unfriendly siblings and in-laws. At first, because I was so taken with her, and also because I drank a lot with them, I did not notice the filth and the wanton killings, but every mood runs its course and when I was sober I knew there was a limit to how far I would wallow. Besides, there were much better moments in my life, some of the best ever, when I could almost feel I was actually happy.

      Now "happy" is a term I loath, because of it is used abusively and there is no "happy", which puts me in the position of a person who hates "gift" because he never gets what he wants on his birthday. What I mean is that to wish for happiness is to want to be like a one-toed sloth with no predators. But there can be specific "happies". I read once about a woman who described an "after-life experience" in which it was "very dark and empty" and there was "no thought, no people, no colors" and it was "not unpleasant". But the woman was not an idiot because when she suddenly saw a bright light she immediately realized it was not heaven but the lamp in her room and what she described before did sound like "happy" enough.

It did not make my passengers happy that my plane was painted canary yellow for easy recognition against jungle green

I was then "happy" during an outing with a bunch of rich, obsolescent hippies, when at night, after a day in the country, I went to sleep in a cheap hotel to the strains of a danzón coming fitfully through the window from a radio nearby. What made this particularly "happy" was the warmth inside me of my passion for Gina, which at that moment transcended sex. Now, far removed in time from that experience, it is "happy" in itself, as is the memory of a night in Benares, in another hotel, through another window, this one overlooking darkened neighborhoods, listening to a voice somewhere singing a song in the "Spanish gypsy" style, and it is "happy" even though my passion then was for a woman I could never again have. The reason I could not have her was because I was insane, rather than neurotic, as I began suspecting during my Gina-romance, a suspicion I had many occasions later to confirm. This displaced the burning moron-issue, but I'll get to this in time. Right now, I only want to remember "happies".

      There was an afternoon, a very torrid sun about 75 degrees above the horizon in a mildly hazy sky, and I sitting in a boat in a choppy tidal lagoon, slowly sipping Scotch and sweating profusely and contentedly as I watched tarpon and kingfish frolicking about me as if they were in a playground for fish, which it literally was. That afternoon beats the boat trip back to Bodrum from a deserted island surrounded by dead coral where I had had my fill of wine with a woman I was having and still occasionally do (although this is getting so far ahead that it exceeds the bounds of even this lengthy narrative). The only reason this moment was less happy than the other one, has to do with that, in a dilapidated caique which to me was like Rainier's yacht with Grace Kelly on board, I had the premonition that such good feeling had to portend a downfall, as it did, which was the beginning of my slow climb to the present, when I do not worry about the future but about its absence. 

      Another reason I carried my Gina-passion lightly at first was that I had a lot of work and did not have any time to spare on my own feelings. I had got an informal contract with a company which needed to ferry personnel to different towns, some of which did not have regular commercial air links. I got the job because Taven recommended me and because my rates were much lower than, say, a King Air, but this did not make my passengers very happy as I could gather from their expressions of dismay when they saw my single-engine, canary-yellow airplane. They had little choice because they were not high-level executives. I did nothing to re-assure them when I explained that I had chosen that colour in part because it was more visible from the air against a very green jungle, but I knew I was being inconsiderate to my clients and later had the plane re-painted with a conventional, space-ship-type, light-aircraft design, like trying to give it the appearance of a supersonic arrow.

      These trips were not daily, but they were for a long time twice- or thrice-weekly and that meant a lot of flying in a plane that could do 180 mph on journeys that involved twice and often much more than twice that distance in one direction and making up to four landings in one day. Usually I returned dog-tired in the late afternoon or at night, but when I was starting I could become lyrical about this and that and one time I wrote this piece of purple prose, which is only a sample of the many I have spared dear reader in the expectation of his gratitude for following me this far. "Coming in from the western sea, sky and water mingled so that the horizon disappeared and it seemed as if the world was inverted. A huge bright patch as of infinite silvery sky pulled the Earth from under the coastal range, which limned itself into the distant space. Clouds like Faustian hands threw quicksilver flashes and brooming wisps as a lambent surf washed against the nearer shore. The paw of the coastline sank its claws into the sea and a thin cuticle of spinddrift outlined the dark green burr of the ridges. The lower summits gradually hove to on one side, and then rose in successive upheavals 'til the wracked, gutted crowns of the massier colossi were barely visible intruding into the belly of the azure sky. On the other side of the cordillera stepped valleys led from a flat, brushy sea-plain to where parallel lines of ridges tumbled far away into a foaming chasm." Notwithstanding the Faustian burrs and the quicksilver cuticles, in time those trips began to feel like lambent colossi on my brooming wisps and as if I were indeed falling into foaming chasms, which I survived thanks to the automatic pilot--more like a wing-leveller--until I lost it in an anvilhead.

Maybe my clients and I could walk away from a dip and not die squealing like pigs upon impact against a mountain side

The reason I got into one of those was that I could not avoid it. I was returning by myself, as usual, as was also that on a stretch of mostly forested land just before the coast there was a file of arrogant, social-climbing cumulo-nimbuses trying to trap commercial airliners. They generally let me by their sides, where their offspring tried to catch up but couldn't get near me at 9,500-feet, except that this one day they were growing before my very eyes and looking like atomic mushrooms, which I naturally tried to skirt by flying this way and that, trending northwards, until I realized that if I kept going off my heading I would end up in the Netherlands Antilles and decided I had to brave the bald pate of the smallest one--they aged very quickly--and went in looking like a guy who had stepped off the electric chair after a last-minute commutation, only no one was about to commutate me.

      Now, I had been in shake-you-up situations before, like the time the jet blast of a DC9 flipped me over like Saburo Sakai, or flying into the airport at Saba, which I did once for kicks, but I was not prepared for the five minutes I spent in that thunderhead--maybe it wasn't that long, but it felt like an hour on a mammoth roller coaster with an acute vertigo-attack--nor for the muscular exertions I had to go through sitting ramrod-straight to prevent the plane from diving at about 5,000-feet per second before climbing at twice that with the speedometer going down to zero or thereabouts and then jumping to 250, which was where the needle stopped and the Piper should have disintegrated. Needless to say, I survived that and a couple of other similar incidents, but the wing-leveller was exhausted and not much after gave out entirely on me, which I noticed when I was working on my logbbook and suddenly looked out and saw the wing pointing directly at what, in a more poetic mood, I had called "the paw of the coastline".

      Incidentally, the airport at Saba was dynamited into the side of an extinct volcano 1,000-feet above the sea and is almost totally square, which gives the impression, if you can manage to focus on it in the middle of turbulence next to which a nervous mongoose is like a bored hippo, that you were landing on a handkerchief. Even experienced pilots had to psyche themselves into believing they had enough runway for a landing with a STOL fully prepared to stop in fifty feet. My apprehensions were not due, as I might have thought, to depth-perception problems, and I only dared to undertake my approach to Saba because if I overshot the runway I always had the 1,000 feet to spare down the cliff side and I was confident I could recover sufficient speed with full engine before I hit the waves.

      Curiously, the most perilous experience did not in itself put me off too much, bar a bout of depression afterwards, which was a clear sign of weariness with flying but which I mistook for all-weather ennui. This time I was flying west at 8,500 and between a cape and a mountain range the engine popped and bucked and I knew I had a problem. I had a wind behind me and beyond the mountains was a large airport, but it was likely I would only reach the range or its foothills--more, at that moment, like the "massier colossi" of my poetic fancy--and that was not good. Behind me was the headwind and the cape where I knew there was an abandoned but perfectly serviceable airstrip. This was a better chance and besides I would be flying with my stalled engine over coastline, which meant if bad got worse I could land on the surf and maybe my passengers and I could walk away from a dip and not die squealing like pigs upon impact against a mountain side.

      I managed to hobble on a spluttering engine to 3,000 feet above the head of the runway, which didn't look good as its pavement had large overgrown patches, and that's where my training in emergency landing patterns paid off. I did two corkscrew turns losing 1500 feet in each and came down for a smooth landing on the tarmac which, despite appearances from above, was still mainly intact. The engine finally quit when my stricken craft finished its run a few yards from a donkey who looked up from munching some interstitial grass, saw no one carrying a saddle nearby, and resumed his leisurely snacking. My comportment had been so admirably cool that when I asked one of the two passengers on board, unusually, a woman, what she had thought about during the emergency, she answered: "My credit cards".

      The main reason this accident did not turn me off flying was that it did not happen mysteriously--I am assuming any one who for no discoverable cause suffers peril to life and limb in a certain situation will in future avoid that situation and others like it--but was entirely due to Meca's disregard for circulars, one of which had instructed that some changes be made to engines like the one in my plane and he might have thought I would be grateful to him for sparing me the expense. Well, I wasn't and I did not sue because I knew it was useless, but I made his wife really angry by calling her Trina instead of the usual Mrs Meca she was used to getting from me.

I was madly in love with a person who, when all is said and done, I deeply despised

Other things were also going on in my life, some of which contributed to my deteriorating status as a conscientious flyer. Through Gina, I connected with leftist political circles. Her good relations in that area had nothing to do with her ideological convictions, which were somewhere between complete indifference and total cynicism, tending to opportunism when money was involved, but with her charm, which is something I felt so acutely I haven't even tried to communicate to the reader, who might justifiably think I had fallen in love with a blank. In this, as in many other things, I exaggerate for effect because I have already said that she was good-looking and a good lay. I have also suggested that she was capable of self-deprecatory, even sarcastic attitudes. She did have this propensity, but she was also friendly to the point of jokey and in general she was fun to be with, which made her likeable to most any one she met. She also had a refined side and it was the mix of wordliness, even coarseness, and of feminine delicacy--in time I would think of her more as something you bought in a delicatessen and didn't digest well--that made her irresistible for me. Her independence and her occasional defiant moods contributed also to my infatuation.

      It is possible I could be making too much of some of these traits, because what I interpreted as an I-spit-on-the-world insouciance was a gossipy column she wrote on people in the entertainment world which every one feared but I always found puerile, sometimes incomprehensible to the point of nonsense. This could be interpreted as that I was madly in love with a person who, when all is said and done, I deeply despised, and this was worse than The Blue Angel because the professor in that film could not see how addled he was and I could. In fact, I not only could: I had also allowed myself to get addled as a kind of experiment in living, which was still part of the rebound from my subordination to the Apocrisiary and before that to the Managing Editor, and so on.

      Anyhow, when I was with Gina and there was talk of "revolution" I pricked up my ears and so conversations were started and continued and casual acquaintances became friends because I met them at the same lefty celebrations and parties. I made it clear to some of them that I was completely detached from bourgeois prejudices. This was either arrant lying or self-ignorance, but they saw in me an useful collaborator, though not very heavy on the intellectual side. If they thought of me as an intellectual lightweight, I thought of them as culturally cretinous. I knew Marx was a pedant and a phony, but they thought he was a god and lamented he hadn't been mummified. So, what if anything could bring us together? For one thing, I never said out loud what I thought of Marx--I wrote it once, with the results I will narrate--and I fooled myself into believing that all of us were loyal and sincere and self-sacrificing partisans of an impersonal and heroic social crusade to save mankind from poverty and injustice and darkness. Basically, I was drinking a lot.

      One of the things the lefties saw in me was the flying and I put my Piper on occasions at their disposal, which I will tell about in the next dip in my life. There is however one significant incident during one of my "political flights" (let's call them that) because it signalled clearly that I was losing it. This requires that I make a distinction between two groups in the leftist intellectual world into which I was edging. There were the politician-intellectuals. It was among these I would later play an active if quite minor role. It was also they who considered I was intellectually retarded. The other group was formed by the intellectuals themselves who authored Marxist dissertations or wrote short stories about peasants and their stick-out ribs or about the dainty mechanics who were scared of their own working tools. The litterateurs were as fanatical as the politicos--it was in their group that you heard the recurrent refrain: "I know I'll have the privilege of being the first victim of a revolutionary firing squad" (horse shit as I knew from purely personal feelings)--but they had wider interests and they were consequently more cultivated.

      Some were extremely well read and among these Lon Bright stood out head and shoulders. I believed that my own education was superior to anything that any one of them could muster, but Bright, who looked so much his part of intellectual he had the bulgiest forehead I have ever seen on a man, left me agape when he told me that he had read the entire Study of History, which I had only read in the Somervell two-tome abridged version, and then, even before I had time to close my mouth, he floored me with the claim that he had read all of The Golden Bough, which I had also read in an abbreviated version. Now, I would show extreme intellectual backwardness if I said anything good about Toynbee or Frazer, but I'll risk the consequences of that and insist that both authors are extremely good reads, even if not by exacting British academic standards--in which the documented colour of Cromwell's underwear takes pride of place over mere speculation--and anybody who had ploughed through them as Bright had not only deserved admiration but also the highest respect for the immense reserve of knowledge he must have had stored in his cranium. Despite his Marxist beliefs, then, he and I could converse contentedly on the neutral ground where pedants shed their inhibitions and give free rein to any intellectual impulse whether or not their grasp is good, which is not to say we hopped about like intoxicated crickets, because we knew enough to have some discipline in our exchanges.

Here was this adulterous slut making a show of indifference to my over-generous offer to make a decent woman of her

There was one political cause on which we coincided and that was on human rights (or what lefties considered such) and it was to give talks on that subject that I flew, with him on board, to a city up in the Andes. The flight there was uneventful but on the way back a dense haze and an overcast forced me to fly below the summits inside a valley, which I had to follow through pure eye contact to where it narrowed to a gorge and out of the mountains, which were quite high, hence no question of attempting an instrumental climb without adequate navigational aids. Lon was looking out and down on the right side and I was doing the same on the left side and we finally emerged from the canyon tense but safe. However, as soon as we did we were inside stratos, very dark and humid--ideal for carburator heat I thought, which my plane did not need because it used injectors--and were flying east, which Bright noticed. This meant I was heading straight back into the mountains and he knew it and said so and, when I turned south, for an instant through the clouds I saw the dark green, almost black, of rock I had missed by not much. Bright and I didn't talk about the incident but I thought about it and convinced myself, with some grounds I believe, that I was going to do that maneuver before he suggested it. Whether or not, I was on notice. But other things were distracting me from seriously considering quitting.

      One of these distractions was that my Gina-romance was going great guns and whenever we could we took week-ends off to different islands in the Caribbean, especially our favorite, Barbados, which was actually out in the Atlantic ocean, far enough to make you feel adventurous and then very relieved when you saw its lovely, beckoning outline. On the way back there were islands and outcrops and sometimes for a lark we went down from nine or ten thousand feet to almost sea level and flew over or around them. We were still supposedly meeting on the sly, but I never asked why our slyness was necessary on weekdays but could be suspended on week-ends. These week-ends were pleasures I was not about to surrender just like that and it took some threatening, even painful, incidents for me to finally give them up. It helped that my relations with Gina hit some unexpected snags, which in turn contributed to the complications in my work as pilot.

      One night we were relaxing after sex and I idly mentioned matrimony. I was certain she would start panting with desire and gratitude but she responded with what sounded awfully like blah, and this not only surprised me but also piqued my vanity. I mean, I loved Gina and all that, but I also had my own self-love and here was this adulterous slut--I wasn't in my anti-macho mood then--making a show of indifference to my over-generous offer to make a decent woman of her. It was incomprehensible and mildly infuriating. So I went after her to see exactly what was cooking. Might as well have refrained. Gina usually only told me exactly what she wanted to and no more, and this time she was being more reticent than usual, which indicated that her greater-than-usual resistance opposed to my greater-than-usual insistence were about to produce sparks. The sparks turned out to be more like lightning.

      After having listened to my numerous insinuations about her sluttish nature, she looked at me and asked point blank: "You think you're what? An irresistible magnet or something? Let me tell you I wouldn't have gone to bed with you if it hadn't been at my husband's urging." I wasn't about to believe that just because she was saying it, although I also knew, in that very instant, that it was true, that it had to be true, because basically why would she be making up such a weird story? OK, I said, so in what way is it true that your husband is responsible for this incredible, once-in-a-lifetime romance? To this she answered with even more impertinence: "Who said it was a once-in-a-lifetime romance? You're the one who keeps building up this shit to what it isn't." Yes, she actually, before my dumbfounded stare, did use the word "shit". This finally persuaded me to take a less romantic view of the situation.

Without knowing it, I had made a proposal to the sexual slave of the author of the Kama Sutra

What did I know of her marriage? I thought her husband was unnoteworthy because he worked in an accounting department somewhere. I was so cocky I once told a poor messenger who angered me for some trivial thing that he would never ascend the Olympian heights I moved in, which at the outside might have been 15,000 feet, overdoing it, and much less than half what an airliner normally did. I beg your kindest pardon, dear messenger person, but, as you would understand if you read this, it was an asshole talking! But this is my neurotic guiltiness showing and has nothing to do with the logical flow of my story, which is now about Gina. I knew her marriage was on the rocks, although I did not even know if she was getting a divorce. I merely assumed it. The "marriage on the rocks" theme was an argument that naturally came to my mind, which she promptly disposed of: "Precisely!" That's what she said, leaving me to infer all the shadowy sexual rituals that went on inside her marriage. "Precisely what?" I asked, and she very illuminatingly answered: "Precisely what I said before."

      This left a big question in my mind about her sluttish nature, because if her marriage was falling apart on account of her husband's unconscionable sexual demands, then, apart from this making her husband, not just not a sexual ninny, but possibly a ferocious big-cocked insatiable priapic monster next to which I was a one-balled libidinally inadequate pervert, she obviously wasn't as sexually emancipated as I believed. She was...she was, I dreaded to think, just an ordinary homemaker manqué! So what I had in my hands at that moment was a marriage proposal which I had made to the sexual slave of the author of the Kama Sutra, a proposal which she had turned down and was now refusing even to explain why, which in view of what I now suspected of her could be either because she was a bored housewife, and not the slut I enjoyed so intensely, or because the nature of her sexual experiences was such that I was not deemed sufficiently sophisticated to be told about them.

      The pickle got prettier and prettier as I kept making stupid questions and she kept telling me the equivalent of: "I don't remember", when she wasn't too surly, and more often: "Mind your own business", which was, in the balance, about the size of it. Understandably, we did not recover the sexual momentum we had attained previously that night and when we separated it was not on a good note.

      For a while I just did a lot of drinking. I sang a happy-go-lucky song  about there being plenty of fish in the sea, but this, as any one who has been a castaway in a raft knows, only made me thirstier. I realized to my horror that not only was I pussywhipped, but that I was also needing Gina the woman, whatever she was or wasn't. All the fantasies I had been allowing myself about her were coming back to haunt me--they looked more like bats out of hell than roosting chickens--and what was worse the world was not stopping because I was having a crisis of passion.

      When I saw that Gina went on with her life, I stalked her by cannily being ahead of her in places where I knew she would be going to because of her work, like some "news" conference or photo-op with a visiting celebrity or a local up-and-coming "star". On one of these occasions I was so very very sauced I even pssted to her, who was on a stage with some starlets, from the orchestra section, and I did it so obtrusively she had to come down to where I was to calm me and more likely to forestall some embarrassing incident.

      Notwithstanding my unseemly behaviour, I think she was flattered to have a man she did not dislike so nuts about her even after she had declined to get soppy about my marriage proposal. Besides she had important news to impart. She had initiated divorce proceedings--with no opposition, be it said, from the sexual artist (whom I kept thinking of as one of the raunchier characters from the Satyricon)--and she told me so when she came and sat beside me in the theatre that night. This I interpreted rightly as a resumption in our relations, which was a self-evident cause for ineffable joy, although what I felt at the moment was relief and I went home and slept my drunk off.

      In that time, sleeping it off included a sober respite of maybe ten hours, and though I was very healthy and I sobered up very thoroughly and quickly, I know now what I ignored then, which was that the constant intake of alcohol had to be affecting my ability to fly. What's more, even old Spyberg, whose belief in psychoanalysis, be it said in fairness to Freud, was as firm as a cheetah's in an impala you didn't have to chase, would have been able to diagnose me at that time as a clinically pure case of acute neurosis, or at any rate of something very much out of the ordinary. So why couldn't I see it myself? In retrospect, this question is only valid in context: it assumes I believed there was such a thing as neurosis and the truth is that neurosis does not exist. But to get to this momentous understanding the process was long and arduous and complex, so the question is still valid for that time and for my extremely abnormal behaviour then, which means that there was something radically wrong with me and this could be called neurosis even if this word did not mean anything very precise to me then or now.

I was reading stuff like the treatise on that famous imperialist Donald Duck, a big chuckle among my commie friends

There are some explanations for my conduct in my story as I have told it so far, but there was the added circumstance at the moment we have arrived that I had reached a nadir of intellectual alienation, still to be compounded by my hopeless and hypocritical political incursions, after which whatever happened to me had to be on the up and up. But don't count too much on that, Dear Reader. Besides, here again I have given in to my love for hyperbole and these statements are due for some clarification.

      First, my period of acute alcoholism did not last very long. It was real while it lasted and I emerged from it a heavy drinker with varying intakes over the years, but it was not permanent nor incapacitating. Second, my intellectual alienation was not as total as I might have made it seem. If an addiction to paperback whodunits is a sign of weak-mindedness, then I was over that phase--which anyway was partly a consequence of my over-exertions with works only accessible to literary super-sophisticates--and my emerging from it was not about to be on an intellectual level where I would be bumping against problems like why a character in a novel by Claude Simon would behave like a subatomic particle, which you never can tell what it is doing unless you catch it red-handed; or how a presumably brilliant thinker like Sartre could posit something called nihilation, which would be a possible but unlikely explanation of why a character in a novel could behave like a subatomic particle. In other words, I was reading a lot, but I was not reading any deep stuff or doing any deep thinking. I was reading novels that did not require a post-doctoral degree in metaphysics and I was reading easy history books--like the one about the Vikings taking to the sea because they were undernourished--and a lot of commie dog's fart, like the treatise on that famous imperialist, Donald Duck, a big chuckle among my commie friends, and other social and political material of that kind. Incidentally, and just to refine the concept I am getting at, the Viking thesis was based on a discarded and fossilized piece of bread which contained a lot of sawdust and was probably the reason the Viking had discarded it in the first place.

      There was a great deal of circularity going on in my life, apart from how the world turned when I was siphoning liquor and dancing with my Gina in discos. Oh, it was a merry whirl! But at the worst of times, I did not lose touch with, let's be outré and call it, the "essential me", "he" who intuited the most abstruse philosophical issues and did it by writing reams and reams in a diary which was mostly unreadable but which kept, now let's really go whole hog!, my "dignity" alive. It was in this diary I first consigned my suspicions that I might not have been a neurotic at all but insane. This clue came to me long after I pssted Gina from her stage down to where I was in the auditorium, for as my subterfuge had worked then despite the seeming craziness, I had no reason to belief I had gone beyond the pale of sanity. In addition, I was not writing solely for my eyes, which could have explained my ignorance about the state of my mind, because Gina had obtained for me a literary column in the magazine for which she worked. This job didn't pay well--it hardly paid at all--but that wasn't important. It was important in that I was being read and understood, so that I knew I was not writing utter nonsense whatever my actions might have suggested. Another benefit of the work she got me was that it gave me a steady occupation after I quit flying and provided me with a foundation on which to head in other directions, which, if my experience in the past was indicative, would surely be dead-ends, but that also was immaterial.

My encounter with the Airstrip From Hell and why Meca thought that best part of the day was still to come

The beginning of the end came on a trip that was out of my usual routine and required a special contractual arrangement because it involved going on short notice to a strip which had been carved in the middle of a forest and had barely enough distance for a small plane to clear the tree tops. The madman who had built it was a risk-taker who could have made it safer, like not using segments of steel railing to mark the head of the runway, which itself was not much different from the surrounding, bumpy, overgrown land. All he had done, basically, was fence in a piece of forest, uproot the trees, and run a grader once or twice down the middle, plus laying down the railings, which were barely visible and would have been a nasty surprise for an unwary pilot on the inevitable short approach. You could say that landing in that field was like having a bad feeling about something that had alredy gone wrong.

      Its builder, Austen Blanc, whom I had met and liked, had got himself once into a very sticky situation. He was still a student pilot, although he had already built his Airstrip From Hell, and one night you could read by the moonlight he thought he could take off and land his Cessna 172. Up in the air, it was another story because what on the ground looked unmistakably like his caricature of an airfield, from the air, even down to 200 feet, was just a yellowish patch surrounded by inky vegetation. He might have been a lover of risks and borderline situations--not unlike me, which might have been why I liked him--but he wasn't fool enough to risk a landing in those conditions. On the other hand, he did not want to risk his accreditation either by going to the nearest large airport, which was closed for the night and would also have presented landing problems from what now seemed like total darkness, even though the moon still beamed in the firmament like a jokester with a sadistic sense of humour. So my friend the risk-taker simply had to go on flying as high as he could to lean the mixture as much as possible and do turns until the sun came out, when he could finally see enough to make his landing. Austen got his comeuppance the day he tried to land on a moving Range Rover but he didn't count on branches and he got his wing clipped and flipped over and lost his plane and his license.

      Why I accepted the assignment to the Airstrip From Hell might seem to put me in the same category of fool as my friend, but as usual there was some method in my foolishness. First, the pay was high; second, I knew my plane could do it; and third, I said to my self: "What the hell!" Everything was normal until the very final approach and that's when for the first time in my flying career my problem with depth perception, perhaps associated with the haze from the previous night's boozing, might have trapped me into a regrettable, if only instantaneous, miscalculation. Even now I cannot say exactly what went wrong but I know what it is I did wrong, which was to have second thoughts as I was hovering a few meters above the travesty of a landing strip. Seeing the top of the forest far above my line of sight I began to have doubts but did not make up my mind either to go for a proper landing or to gun the engine and try again or give it up, and in that instant of hesitation the plane stalled and fell down, not high enough for a real crash landing, but sloppily enough to miss the runway and ram the landing gear against the hummocky grass over which it rolled until it collapsed and the left wing hit the ground and made my trusty but aging Piper do a quarter spin to a yard before a barbed wire fence, another of Austen's brilliant ideas.

      I did not get my payment and I had to take Meca and an assistant mechanic over muddy, rock-strewn jungle roads to the site of the accident. To me it looked hopeless but using vises and wire and metal stumps and soldering here and there they finally attached the left wheel securely to the wing and Meca told me to take it away. When I offered him a ride back he said: "No, thanks".

      I had noticed that he never flew the planes he repaired, which he said was from fear of heights, so I wasn't surprised. I knew the extra ton or so of metal on the left wing had to affect the control of the plane but I was not prepared for the violent jolt to port I felt as soon as the plane took off and I don't think my reflexes have ever been as fast, despite the mess of drinking, as they were in turning the wheel sharply right, where it stayed the rest of the trip to Maquita.

      I saw Meca as I was lifting and he was standing there with his assistant looking as if the best part of that day was still to come, but I wasn't about to make a spectacle of myself by crashing sideways into the trees and breaking all the bones in my body before I died in horrible spasms of agony. Meca's reticence about flying back with me could be interpreted as the extreme irresponsibility of some one who sends another to a certain death he obviously does not want to share. Upon more careful consideration I have come to the conclusion that his attitude stemmed neither from fear of flying nor from callousness about his fellow man, but from the fact that, even though he was a competent airplane mechanic, he never could figure out how the damn things managed to stay up in the air.

On a trip to Rio, I hone my photographer's skills with Gina (an achievement I get to regret a lot in due time)

I took the time during which my plane was laid up to hound Gina about marriage until she finally gave in. Why she consented to marry a virtual alcoholic can only be explained because she also had a drinking problem and might not have found my behaviour as objectionable as I knew it was. I am not even sure she was already divorced when we married but that's alright because I am not sure either whether I divorced her before I was kicked out of Costaguana as a dangerous subversive not before being put in a military jail for a month and a half.

      Whatever its legal status, our marriage got off to a rollicking start. We went to Rio for our honeymoon and it was like paradise. It was winter down there and the weather was cool but not so much that we could not loll on the white sands of Copacabana and body surf the huge lovely breakers. The oceanfront avenue had still not been widened from two lanes to the eight-lane motorway it became later and Laranjeiras, the old neighborhood of houses with tiles and shady streets and gardens, had not been levelled to make way for huge apartment buildings.

      We were fucking with clockwork regularity, which meant any time we were alone after doing like beachcombers or tourists, but my mind was so suffused with sex and I was so erectile that I even came while dancing with my brand-new whore of a wife. We regularly ate a tasty, creamy white fish called Namorado, which fittingly in Portuguese means "in love". My stuff was probably more lubricity than love, but whatever, it was intense and daredevil.

      We had a large room with a view on the Atlantic from a balcony. The light was splendid and I had not forgotten my photographic skills which I put to good use in taking pictures of Gina in all states of undress and in all the poses I could imagine, full body, waist up, and close up, even very close up. I had her in the midst of coition beneath me--it didn't matter I wasn't coming with her because she was multiorgasmic--and I had her smiling up from my smiling other self. I captured her legs spread doing herself or making as if she was because there was no need for that although I do think she did it for the fun of it. What I considered my masterpiece was a sequence of her arriving at the room looking slightly mussed for inferrable reasons, going through a strip-and-self-fondling routine, then to bed frontally stark naked, then opening up to me in full-bodied splendour down to explicit detail with a dreamy face, which, as I closed in, took on the exquisite modulations of passion and delight. Little did I know what she intended doing with those pictures. But I wander.

      Shortly before our trip ended, returning from a visit to Chacra do Ceu--a museum you do not visit for the art, which is OK as far as it goes, but for being glad to be alive--I was brought abruptly to other realities when I saw a bunch of cops roughing up a guy who couldn't have been that guilty and one of them noticed me staring and looked back hard as if saying: "This is what's going to happen to you if you don't look the other way", which I promptly did. It was a wise decision because I knew you could get pretty banged up in that city if you didn't watch your step.

      My domestic life with Gina was for a while an attempt to replicate the Rio experience, and we nearly succeeded. My plane was again operational and I would return from my trips drooling for her. The drinking also was not abating. They say alcohol is bad for the libido but that's not the way I had it figured then. I found it thoroughly disinhibitory, hence aphrodisiacal.

I discover Tantrism of the orgiastic, mind-blowing kind, which also propounded meditating on piles of stinking, rotting corpses and, if you really got into the spirit of things, having them for supper

I felt so sex-and-drink oriented I thought I had found in Tantrism a nearly ideal system of beliefs. "System" is not the most appropriate term in this context, but allow me to explain briefly. My first serious approach--as opposed to just knowing such words as Buddhism, Hinduism, and so on--to Oriential religion-philosophy involved Zen Buddhism through a book by a German Jesuit with a French name who lived in Japan. The heart of Zen is the koan, which is a riddle without an answer, but the trick is to think it has an answer and after you get a migraine from thinking about it you are ready for enlightenment. I think it was used to train Kamikaze pilots and it works fine for Japanese bonzes but it only helped me to sound very knowing.

      Then I read a biography of Rasputin in which it was said he belonged to a sect called Klysty which preached holiness through sinning, but Rasputin so discredited it with his antics, like blandishing his pecker in the best restaurant in St. Petersburg, that I couldn't take it seriously. In Canada, the Klysty or a branch thereof used to disrobe and burn barns. That didn't make for many converts either. I knew about the Cathars, elsewhere known as Buggers, and about all the shenanigans of the Anabaptists in Münster, but the literature on these sects was not abundant and it seemed to me they were trying to have a good time in anticipation of heaven, and this was unnecessary overkill. Then I read about Tantrism and there I did find something that could be considered a serious attempt to express why I felt I was in heaven when I was drunk--and when I say drunk in this text I have never actually meant drunk-drunk--and having an orgy with Gina and all the bawdy images I had of her.

      In both Hinduism and Buddhism escape is sought from samsara. Escape is called Moksa in Hinduism, Nirvana in Buddhism. It was Buddhism that first developed the doctrine that all is a void. In the void it is not possible to distinguish between samsara and nirvana or between spirit and flesh and this leads directly to Tantrism, in which the distinctions are confounded without having to renounce enlightenment. This blending of opposites can be achieved through behaviour which is manifest in unorthodox sexual practices, which sounded good to me. Tantrism, in sum, constituted a justification of what normally would have been called my degenerate and filthy mind. But there were a few caveats, if this is the right word when you admit at the start the goods you are showing are undeniably shoddy. A famous Javanese king named Kertanagara, who went to great pains in organizing his orgies, was killed in the middle of his last one. This was an object lesson I was only half taking seriously. There was worse. Tantrism, at least of the orgiastic, mind-blowing kind I was taking an interest in, also propounded such unlovely practices as meditating on piles of stinking, rotting corpses and, if you really got into the spirit of things, having them for supper. I could understand how such experiences would be very educational about life's, what could we call them?, unfortunate inevitabilities, but the closest I had been to a lot of rotten flesh was a dead cow on a highway and then I had stepped on it for all I was worth and as I couldn't shake the smell for about ten miles I was gasping and coughing and arcing up like a Boche who got caught in a wind shears during Bloody Wipers action. Besides, the rotting carcasses thing was a throwback to the Carrion Rites and Père Lachaise and Kraft-Ebbing (at one time bed-reading for me), all of which I had left behind me a long time ago, so I wasn't about to get hung up on death again just because it was part and parcel of a religious experience that seemed to approximate the fun I was having with Gina.

      I can say of this aborted initiation into Tantrism that it was at least a first step towards my further explorations of Indian religions, but also that I was right in not taking it too seriously as regards my own case, because when I visited the Khajuraho temples in Bihar I understood that when Tantrism said orgy it was the sort of party to which even mares were invited. Besides, my sally towards Tantrism was named Gina and the intensity of our sexual life had begun insensibly but surely to taper off.

      The crisis began in a big way the day I turned back cancelling a flight on a flimsy excuse my client did not appreciate. I didn't care. I was roaring to be back inside my slut of a wife and I called her and went home and she was waiting and I undressed and laid there with her in front of me, not a stitch on her (but a thin choker she wore in all the photographs), lips parted ready for anything, and when I looked down my other self was down and, as I gathered with mounting terror, out as well. If I had spinned when Fanny left me and when Gina was playing coy about marriage, then this time can only be described as a spin without a rudder. Gina exerted herself trying all the technical rescue-and-resuscitation operations she knew of and when the results were patently nil she went and most inconsiderately masturbated as if that was going to stimulate me who couldn't have masturbated even if I had beat myself all day with a vibrating mitt smeared with brilliantine and shaving foam.

In order to compensate for a momentary malfunction, I recur to a paltry whore with a big chip on her shoulder

It was obvious that I had a problem--perhaps transitory, but at such embarrassing moments you tend to feel as if you had contracted leprosy--and Gina did not. She wasn't laughing at my stricken condition, next to which, it seemed to me, the bridge over the Straits the time of the accident had been brushed by a mosquito, but she seemed very much aware that she was unscathed. I tried to salve my pride and my fears about permanent inoperability by arguing within myself that women had it made because they were the attractors and they subdued their prey without having to exert themselves, which was supposed to be as if a zebra were selling a lioness on the quality of its meat. The worst part was still to come because the days went by and Gina kept masturbating herself--in her view, sex was a daily necessity--and I at first panted along as if I was getting a great kick from what she was doing and then tried reading but her obvious delectation--it sounded to me as if she was enjoying that more than having sex with me--did nothing to enhance my concentration. Every character I encountered in a novel was a sexual fiend if there was the slightest mention of sex. I went to see a physician and obliquely inquired about a friend who was having problems like mine. He was good enough not to laugh in my face, but the best he could do was to tell me the wheeze about sex and bicycle riding, which I considered then and there insufficient. It only served to reinforce even more my impression that doctors were quacks.

      This situation did not improve my alcoholic condition but I rejected any connection between drinking and sexual dysfunction. I reasoned that for abstinence to have a potentiating effect it would take at least a month during which Gina would be merrily masturbating away every night while I watched, in every sense of the word, impotently. Finally I decided I had to test myself and went out one night and had myself a paltry, ugly whore with a whig which I knocked off when she got impertinent with me about not coming soon enough. She was one chip-on-your-shoulder prostitute, but I got it up quite nicely despite the drinking and despite the shoddy goods I had to work with, and when I left I felt relieved. Unfortunately, this alleviation of my previous worries was spoiled for me when I got home and found that Gina wasn't there, which got me started on my Moor of Venice role, another new one for me and one that, consciously or not, I was going to play to the hilt.

      My condition was not made any better as a result of the incident that finally led me to break with flying. It was much less threatening than the emergency with the engine or the inadequate landing in the Airstrip From Hell, but it was more unnerving because the threat and the fear came from within me.

      I was on a routine flight during which visibility was truly unlimited. My tiny Piper was like a gnat flying steadily in a huge void. This could have gone on forever and I could have fallen asleep and nothing would have changed. But I wasn't drowsy. I was just sitting there my left index finger hooked around the wheel, which was all the steering that was needed, when I felt anxiety start creeping inside me and it very quickly began feeling like panic. But what was there to be panicky about? Nothing, I thought, but that only allayed the panic for an instant before it began developing into outright terror. It didn't get there because I sat up, shook my head, and put the plane into a steep dive and did a chandelle and then I jiggled the wings and did very sharp turns to left and right and after a while I simmered down enough so that I could put the plane back on its heading at a steady altitude above and below any traffic headed in the opposite direction and I finally managed to conclude that very unsettling and decisive trip.

      I have devised various explanations for this most unprofessional reaction, unworthy of my hero Saburo Sakai, who would have pissed on me if he had found out about it. The most persuasive is that I had an anxiety attack with a touch of claustrophobia. But that simply means that I was then, given the circumstances, more neurotic than ever. Whatever it was, though, it meant I was again afraid of flying which was how my pilot's career had begun and how it was now ending ingloriously without even the benefit I first envisioned when I first began taking flying lessons.

I was ejected from the Phoenicia and I didn't get any satisfaction by shouting what a den of thieves and whores that was, which wasn't making any headlines, especially among the neighbours

To make matters even worse, if such was possible, when I got home, even before I served myself my first drink of the night, I noticed that the red copying-paper box where I kept Gina's photographs was in the sitting room, but it was empty! Not so incidentally, I did my own developing and copying in the magazine's lab and I didn't go around making a show of my prowess as a photographer, nor of Gina's natural endowments, which indicates that she might have been a slut but she was my slut despite the abandon with which I gave myself to fantasies about her. I decided to go out again rather than get plastered by my lonely, especially without the ritual accompaniment of Gina moaning and making masturbatory noises, for it was obvious to me that she hadn't gone out to do the same thing with her own photographs in a hotel room by herself.

      That night I wasn't going to get even the questionable satisfaction that the chip-on-the-shoulder whore had provided me. I went to the Phoenicia, a night spot that belonged to a guy I only knew as Prairie Dog. By day he ran a domino parlour and by night he donned a ridiculous white tuxedo to oversee his whores. I was rather too eager to do a drink-and-forget act, which played perfectly into the hands of the make-'em-drink whores, and I treated all of them to champagne while zeroing in on one in particular, but I got so cross-eyed when I paid my tab expecting her to follow me she bridled arguing I was too drunk. My appeals to Prairie Dog went unheeded because she said she wasn't a white slave and she laid whom she wanted to and that she didn't want to lay a drunk that night and that she had filled her quota for a week and that, in sum, she wanted to go home and sleep. I was practically ejected and I didn't get any satisfaction either when I stood in front of the Phoenicia shouting what a den of thieves and whores that place was, which wasn't making any headlines, especially among the neighbours. I barely escaped an arriving patrol car and when I got home Gina still hadn't arrived but I was too soused to care and promptly fell asleep, although became instantly unconscious would be more accurate.

      I did not see Gina again until the week-end, when we went to the beach with a group of friends, all of whom were hugely enjoying themselves while I nursed my suspicions and resentments, in which I was both Otello and Iago in one nifty package. Gina was being flirtatious and in that sense she was an unwitting ally to my own broodings. Possibly, just possibly, she might have been trying to stimulate me, because I caught her sneaking looks at me, but that could also have been to see whether I had noticed she was putting her hand up another man's crotch, that man not being me, which could also have been part of her stimulating-hubby plan, and so it went until my mind, like a whirligig spiralling inwards, finally got stuck in the least re-assuring of my theories and I went and slapped her across the face a couple of times. That dampened the party somewhat and Gina was not doing a married-life-is-bliss jig, so I figured the best I could do was to make a shamed-dog exit. I would have liked to have to put Gina and my entire life behind me then, but I could not do a disappearing act. Life is inconvenient in that way. You cannot get to point two in time without going through point one and sometimes to get from one to the other you have to cover a lot of fractions, at which I hadn't gotten very good over time.

      After the beach incident, Gina was not in a talking mood and as I was occupied liquidating my flying business--basically, finding a buyer for my Piper--we didn't have many occasions for meeting face to face. I was sleeping in the proverbial couch in what to me seemed like the proverbial dog house. And of course I was looking for a place to move to. Oddly, Gina was on her best behaviour and when we crossed glances I sensed she really wasn't minding my brutality, as if she was getting, after the blows, an additional kick, perhaps from knowing how much I desired her. Well, I still did and my removal from the premises was not without a lot of painful self-commands, but I knew our situation was hopeless: sooner or later it would dissolve and I was feeling so guilty I wanted it to be sooner rather than later. Gina had replaced her photographs in their usual place and looking at them one day shortly before leaving I felt so nauseous I went to the bathroom and vomited. When I recovered in a cold sweat I tore them up and flushed the pieces. As I was also in a hurry to get out of flying, I put a more than reasonable price on my Piper and soon found an interested party who got me to lower the price still further, but there too I wanted a quick out, and my separation from Gina and from piloting were nearly coincident. You could say on both counts that I had been to the edge and back.

The good reasons I had for doubting that the waffler-man had actually been tortured

There is at least one thing I have to thank politics for, which is that it helped me to survive at that critical juncture in my life. It may be the only good it ever did me. But it wasn't like it came to my aid in a time of troubles. I was already into politics when I quit flying. Piloting and politics overlapped. Piloting was my first contribution to the politics of Costaguana, and it wasn't always constructive. The trip with Bright was in a good cause, but the trip to Grenada was even against my principles.

      My initial encounters with the local lefties had a chain-reaction effect and I got to know so many of them I could have compiled a Marxist who's who, which however would have been about the most useless undertaking of my life. I could even put them into categories. Besides the two I defined before, there were also those constituted by the loud-mouths and the wannabes. The country had recently been going through a Castro-bug phase and loud-mouth would-be terrorists mingled with former loud-mouths who had been chastised by a spell in the calaboose and this radical scene shaded imperceptibly into the legal and front-politics stage. The legal front men were there to remit the whining of the loud-mouths when they were thrown in jail for behaving as if the laws did not apply to them.

      There was also a lot of talk of torture but the only "fully documented" case was that of a man with a large scar in his buttocks which he claimed resulted from the application by the military of a very hot waffler. The weight of evidence was that the scar was big and that it did look like a waffle. But I knew this wasn't necessarily from the deliberate application of a waffler because back in The Republic my own Sancho Panza had told me about the time he had deserted from the army and he had been whipped so badly in the ass that the scabs that formed were the size of beehives and fell on the floor with a thud. His description of his scarred ass reminded me of a waffle. The liar was either the waffler-man or Sancho Panza, and, call it intuition, but I was inclined to think that my personal informant was only guilty of exaggeration whereas the public denunciator was probably lying and his scar had been produced by a cause other than torture.

      Some of my first solid contacts on the left were with former loud-mouths, perhaps because, after getting kicked around by their jailors, they were less presumptuous and more condescending with strangers. However, this also put me in touch with the loud-mouth wannabes further to the left. These were the ones who had not been to jail, or had been there for only short periods, so they talked as if they wanted a real fight for power, although what they were really good at was keeping out of the way of the people who wanted to put a collar on them. In sum, they talked big, they implied they were good "liquidators", and especially they passionately desired to be taken seriously, which mostly they weren't. It was the wannabes who first saw the good use to which my plane could be put.

      The last time the reader saw me in Grenada I was surrounded by a squad of heavily armed soldiery who looked like candidates for a basketball scholarship. But I wasn't worried because wannabe Tirso was with me. Turh to say, I was there because of Tirso and I didn't know how much pull Tirso had with those guys, and that should have worried me. I had met Tirso on the human-rights trip with Bright because he had some friends in prison he wanted us to help him with. His name wasn't even Tirso but Algernon and the Tirso he had got out of a funny hat as a nom de guerre because anybody who was anybody on the left had to have a nom de guerre, which implied some vague underground activity like clandestine wearing of fatigues or meeting people in very dark apartments, as if the owners, usually shadowy figures in the background brewing coffee, were saving on their light bills.

Papillon would have fared better eating cockroaches than gorging on coconuts to survive solitary confinement

The people Tirso was interceding for were hopeless cases, being so obviously guilt. One of them had been caught in fraganti trying to shoot a general. Prisoners came and prisoners went but this one stayed put. Some one told him that the only way he, maybe, could be transferred to a nuthouse, where he had a chance of escaping, was to make as if he were mad, for which there were three classic symptoms: to wander about alone talking to yourself, to claim you were hearing voices, and, the real litmus test, to eat your own excrement. Papillon, the famous escapee from Devil's Island, tried that successfully, but on the third point all he did was dilute the soup pot by pissing on it in front of his prison mates and then serving himself a plateful and eating from it, which the other prisoners found very un-gourmet-like and quickly reported it to the doctor, another gourmet, who fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Tirso's buddy knew he had to be more convincing than that and went and ate his own shit directly in front of revolted guards, who almost lynched him. I could understand their feelings because I looked the other way in the scene from Salò in which the hapless--that's about the best way to call half the characters in that film--were made to serve themselves from a huge cauldron of warm crap, even though I knew it was just some brown, crud-like prop. In real life, Tirso's friend didn't even get a medical hearing but instead earned for himself the sobriquet of the Shit-Eater.

      Incidentally, the credibility of Papillon has been impugned, but I am inclined to believe him because he died from a stroke at the cusp of his literary glory and he clearly states in his book that during the century or so he claims he spent in solitary confinement, he survived on a steady diet of coconut meat (and not cockroaches as in the movie), reputedly great for building hard arteries, which means he would have been better off eating cockroaches.

      The other detainee Tirso was vouching for had pulled a Sten gun out of a car's trunk and proceeded to spray a military road block with the foreseeable consequences. Strangely enough, he was later pardoned and went and tried the same stunt again but this time his intended victims sprayed him back. Well, Tirso and I had a long talk in which I nodded a lot and also tsk-tsked, which he might have interpreted as ideological solidarity when what I meant was something like: "Too bad, old chum, but I wouldn't help you even if I could, and I can't".

      Tirso wasn't a bad sort, just misguided and probably fanciful, and it was from feeling a slight guilt over my indifference to his pleas that later I agreed when he asked me to ferry him to Grenada where he expected to obtain something that he said would be useful in the pursuance of the military activities of the group to which he belonged. This might sound as if he was asking me to participate in a military offensive culminating in the bloody overthrow of a reactionary government bound hand and foot to imperialism and the bourgeoisie, but I knew this wasn't the case. There were two good reasons for this: as I said, Tirso was fanciful, and his so-called revolutionary group was so pathetic an agent Castro sent to check them out, and barely managed to escape, reported that the Cuban government should stick to sticking it to the CIA. Thus ended Castro's meddling in the affairs of his Latin American neighbors, which even Guevara's failure in Bolivia had not entirely curbed. In gratitude for the good counsel he got, Castro promoted his agent to general but later had him executed for drug-running, a charge no one believed at the time I was in Cuba.

      But I am digressing and the Grenadan grenadiers were closing in on me even as the propeller in my plane did one final quick turn and started to a halt. I knew that Tirso had to have some pull in that island because of letters he had shown me which were obviously authentic, unlike the phony documents his group forged in which the military confessed, as if any one was asking them to, they were quaking in their boots and were ready to surrender as soon as Tirso and his friends showed up armed in front of a road block. As to the Grenadans, every one knew they meant revolutionary business because they had executed the previous prime minister and had immediately asked Castro to send a boatload of Cubans not likely to ask for asylum. The encounter at the airport was tense for a while, but Tirso soon got things cleared up with the captain of the basketball team and I could relax while he went about his business whatever it was, which I knew, because I had made it clear to him, could not involve even carrying a roll of caps for a toy pistol in my plane.

      My Grenada vacation was brief. Even briefer was my stint as unofficial pilot to the socialist presidential candidate, V. J. Langer, front-man number one, whose popularity can be gauged from the fact that his front organization was less popular than his clandestine backers, who were not popular. It consisted in taking him, who looked brave--he always looked brave--to somewhere he was going to give a speech, in a little plane he did not feel comfortable with.

The low-productivity, homesick cows, or why I could not avoid being a commie

Dear Reader will be wondering how it was that with my scepticism I was palling around with such a bunch of losers and there are explanations. One is that I am now making distance from my circumstances then, because my intention is that this book should seem like the redemption of a seemingly incurable if sarcastic neurotic, which is of the essence in "Gradus", the third and last part of these confessioms. This must be construed as that at the time I wasn't as sceptical as I am now. Another explanation is more in the nature of a qualifier, because, with the exception of Tirso and his group, not all of these people were necessarily losers and in time some would scale heights unforeseen, even unforeseeable when I knew them, which is obviously why they could seem like losers. Therefore, then, what would bear some explaining is why, on the assumption that I was being rational at the time and I am being rational now, I held the views I freely confess to, although I must add that being rational does not entail right belief, or even belief in anything.

      If I had to give a bottom-line reason for my leftism, I could do worse than to mention cows, more specifically low-productivity cows, which is not as surprising as it sounds considering the Cuban Holstein that was awarded a diploma--her name was in gold letters and the collective farm's in ordinary black ink--because she had produced something like sixty liters of milk in one day. As she was not heard of much afterwards, it could be presumed the effort did her in. But the cows I am talking about produced only between four and six liters of milk a day, which considering the size of a cow and the time it spends chewing the cud is low indeed.

      Despite all my ironies before about hypocritical ecologists, I must take their side in what I am about to write. To be able to nurture the underperforming cows I have cited, Costaguana had gone to a lot of expense and deliberately destroyed thousands of square miles of primeval jungle. Whether that jungle would have been good for anything other than making insects and ecologists happy, I cannot say, but what followed upon its destruction was astounding enough to make any sensible head shake in disbelief.

      The cows themselves, which cost a mint, were not slackers. In other latitudes they yielded milk for pasteurization, pulverization, and cheese-making for domestic markets with as much or more left over for exports. But when transplanted to sweltering lowlands denuded of jungle, though not of insects and parasites, and re-planted with pastures so un-nourishing a goat would disdain them, they became sickly and sad and, mooing for Denmark or Switzerland, their udders dried up. As to make them truly contented would have required unimaginable investments in air-conditioning, it was thought that what they needed were the genetic strains of hardy tropical bulls among which the most renowned were the Brahma bulls of Asia, which meant spending another mint in another cattle-import program. Cross-breeding was carried out, which the cows liked, but the end results were the measly four to six liters a day, the latter figure making cattlemen exude satisfaction. Their satisfaction had nothing to do with their cows performance, which they weren't dumb enough to believe was really anything to brag about.

      By the time the jungles had been fell, deficient infrastructure had been built, bad quality pastures had been sown, cattle had been imported and crossbred, each liter of thinnish milk laboriously extracted from each squalid cow cost as much as a brick of gold. But the worst was that the producers claimed they could not make ends meet and rather than let them fend for themselves, the Costaguanan state opted for generous subsidies as if the uneconomical production of milk was the primary goal of economic development. Thus, the system for extracting watery milk from miserable cows for sale at exorbitant prices no one could pay, permanently substituted the previous natural order, and the beneficiaries of this brilliant scheme became multi-millionaire clients of the state. If they had returned in taxes part of what they were getting in subsidies, it would have been an absurd recycling system for making some people rich and creating badly remunerated jobs in lands which had no inhabitants to start with. But they weren't returning anything much and basically the state was giving away money.

      Not content with having discovered an apparatus worthy of Rube Goldberg--a famous American inventor who patented the remote control back-scratcher--the state then encouraged these enterprising, self-reliant dairy farmers to band together and invest in plants for making powdered milk, which they presumably could afford from all the free money they were getting, but this resulted in an outcry for more and greater subsidies. Since these would have bankrupted the state, the milk-producing powder-milk industrialists were allowed to import huge amounts of duty-free powdered milk, which was precisely what the state had wanted to avoid in the first place with its milk subsidies.

      I might not have known too much about my personal neurosis, but collectively if this did not deserve the name neurotic, the word had no right to exist. When Castro, no mean neurotic himself, got started, especially during his frog-legs period--an idea some one (later executed) sold him for flooding the French market--it was obvious to hopeful, well-meaning people like me that, however badly he performed, he could never do anything as botched as Third World Costaguanan capitalism. Besides, the evidence for communism as an antidote to underdevelopment seemed strong.

Every one knew something was seriously wrong when John Wayne started saying "Charlie" instead of the customary "Chinkandgook"

I had a farrago of ideas in which it was not easy to find some coherence. I was still certain that communism had nothing to offer developed capitalist countries, but underdeveloped countries were different. They were different because of environmental determinism. This was the concept that the tropics were inimical to economic development. Russia was not exactly tropical, but communism was there to stay and according to CIA Sovietologists it worked. After Sputnik there had been the famous Soviet pooch Laika and satellites big enough to accomodate NASA and finally Gagarin, the first orbiting astronaut. By comparison Alan B. Shepard, Jr.'s up and down ride was like a glorified elevator trip. So intrinsically, communism was not the best system for industrialized countries where capitalism already existed, but it was good in countries where it had substituted capitalism, even though I wasn't enthusiastic about Brezhnev and his sidekick Suslov, who had replaced my old shoe-wielding buddy Khrushchev. As to the underdeveloped countries, a bad environment compounded by idiocy sponsored by capitalist development economics made economic development impossible, unless the sort of social qualities that were being displayed by the Vietnamese were applied, and these virtues could only obtain under communist rule, hence the need for me to back a cause I knew would start by putting me in front of a firing squad because I was a petit bourgeois intellectual with a small bank account. Clear, so far? OK, let's go on from that.

      What was so special about Vietnam? What were these sterling qualities I so admired? They were discipline and ingenuity and courage, but especially they had to do with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger going berserker and placing American armed forces in a state of nuclear alert because some one sneezed in the Near East and then ordering that Vietnam be bombed back to the Stone Age, which was after Lyndon Johnson had commanded that the Indochinese jungle be defoliated and then obliterated, yet the Vietnamese were not cowed because they were mostly living like stoical and laborious groundhogs.

      To all this was added, in my view, the complex picture emerging from America, where, as a result of the convergence of the opposition to the Vietnam War with the civil rights movement, some liberals were getting too big for their boots. This was the time of marches and sit-ins and of causes such as defendants' rights and affirmative action. Joining the counterculture, which involved plenty of free sex, was widespread and naturally received a lot of media attention. Mainstream attitudes were not affected by these social trends--except open-ended sex, which became the main theme of many Hollywood movies--but the perception existed that American society was literally and figuratively going to pot. Watergate and Nixon's downfall announced radical political upheavals in a country so divided some sectors of the population appeared to be rooting for its worse enemy. The most damning piece of evidence was John Wayne calling the Vietnamese Charlie instead of the more traditional Chinkandgooks. In sum, despite frequent trips to America--my commie leanings were unknown to the INS, which might not have cared even if they had been--I was creating a myth I could integrate into my mythology of a world changing in accordance with my wishes for a future of justice and fraternity among nations and races. It must seem obvious by now that I did not stop drinking after I quit flying and separated from Gina. The reverberations in my brain of all these ideas and events would be stilled in due time, but before that happened I did a lot of writing and politicking under their less than unambiguous influence.

Sundance E. Dare gave his first speech when he was born, but he made the mistake of hiding in ill-lit apartments whose owners spent all day brewing coffee               

During my piloting days, I had been inducted into a kind of political cell which was definitely leftist. Other than that we didn't know what it was. Its leader was Dare, Sundance A. Dare, to be precise, a political pseudonym and nom-de-guerre he had put together with the initials of his real name. The Sundance came from a manifest social tendency in Costaguana to invent names--like, say, you are the son of Isabel and of Juan and they name you Isan or Juis (pronounced like juice)--or to adopt foreign names. Even dyed-in-the wool fanatical communists carried such monickers as Earle, which I presumed originated in the British nobiliary designation. Had the bearer been a consistency bug, he should maybe have changed his name to Boyar or Mandarin.

      Sundance did not have a clue about anything as a result of a state of mental confusion belied by his habitual chin-out, pop-eyed posture of defiance against a world which in his mind was either controlled or tainted by the CIA. Of his confusion I can say in truth--and not, for instance, as a consolatory gesture--that it was greater than mine, and that is saying a hell of a lot, as the reader will have gathered from my attempts to put into words my ideological stance. However, if the ultimate source of my confusion was a neurotic rejection of the Apocrisiary's dictatorial interferences in my life, the wellspring of Dare's confusion had to lay elsewhere, for his only recriminations against his own father were that he was a skinflint and that he had remarried or that he had become gay, I cannot remember which.

      Dare's leadership was founded on his astounding rhetorical gifts. If legendary stories are to be credited, Dare gave his first speech when he was born. Unlike Demosthenes, who practiced outshouting the waves with a mouthful of pebbles--this makes him a worthy predecessor of Canute the Dumb--Dare's natural carrying power was like that of a portable disco or a karaoke. This was both his gift and his damnation because he became so enamoured of his own voice that he was incapable of accepting a subordinate role. Tales were told of Dare in which as a young government minister he would be harumphing and emitting high c's, while his boss, none less than the country's President, struggled to get his attention, which he vehemently refused to give.

      Incredibly for such a recalcitrant man, Sundance fell in love with Castro--he himself was bald and beardless--and threw away a promising political career for life in the underground, which, as will be recalled, consisted in occupying ill-lit apartments whose selfless owners brewed coffee in total darkness. It was in one of these apartments that he was reading by candlelight when the police arrived and switched on the ceiling lamps. Dare barely had time to cram himself into a hole with a grate that had been prepared for him. He liked to tell the story that the detective who arrested him must have been none other than Sherlock Holmes, because he had inferred from an open book left on a chair next to a smoking taper that Dare just had to be somewhere in that apartment, its other occupants presumably being either moles or illiterates.

      Dare was ingenuous in many ways. Most of his family worked for the government whose violent overthrow he advocated, so he was like a terrorist setting off bombs in his own backyard. You could say that many of the people who were on the left with him were in the same dilemma, because the country was filthy with oil income it hadn't earned--and was wasting on lacklustre cows, among countless other such schemes--and what every one wanted, including Fidel Castro, was to lay their hands on it. Dare was not so foolish as to believe otherwise and his fascination with Castro was not out of love but from the gnawing thought that he was capable of giving longer speeches than those of the Cuban dictator, and be more insulting to the CIA in the bargain.

The most remarkable thing about Assuage was that he was big, very big, and he had once escaped, from an island prison no less, disguised as a woman

I will say for Dare that he was perfectly indifferent to lucre. His thing was having unconditional followers and he must have observed when Gina introduced us that I was ripe for guidance. Since my thing was merely dipping into politics, I did not mind being inducted as the disciple of such an outstanding personality, especially as it did not preclude my other dippings, which were still flying and making love to Gina. The other inductees into his cell were Josip Lakas, a fat lawyer with a sadistic streak; Monty Assuage, a former major who had been cashiered for trying to boss his colonel about; a drunkard every one called Old Shoot; and the great opportunist Manny Lockjaw. As I will not be having much to say about the three last ones--the fat lawyer will have the equivalent of small speaking role later--I will dispose of them quickly.

      The most remarkable thing about Assuage was that he was big, very big, which spoke tons for the vigilance in Costaguanan jails, for he had once escaped, from an island prison no less, disguised as a woman. Old Shoot had the soul of a political hack. He was no more a leftist than I was a politician and his problem was he had followed Dare during the latter's "terrorist phase". My relations with him were bound to be cozy because we both indulged freely and tolerated each other, as when he nearly dislocated my right arm the time he fell upon me as I stumbled next to him to make sure he got home and did not go to sleep on the sidewalk--as I said, I was never drunk-drunk--or when he stood by me while I engaged in an exchange of couplets with an ukulele player in which his rhymed and mine did not and the group around us directed at me invective such as: "Hey, jerk, 'rat' does not rhyme with 'crocodile'".

      Lockjaw had the knack of making disgruntled military do his bidding. This was no mean feat as our opportunistic comrade-under-Sundance could instigate uprisings the way trainers make dogs stand up and dance, or jump through hoops, but he was better because he made the military jump through flaming hoops and mutts are not dumb enough to risk singeing even when offered three meals a day and early retirement. Lockjaw wasn't even part of the cell. He flitted about among as many political circles as he could get access to, but Sundance believed he was one of his unconditionals and even talked of disciplining him, which as far as I could make out meant excluding him from our gatherings and that was exactly what he was doing without benefit of discipline. Of this bunch, the opportunist had the far better career opportunities and, after he was finally excluded from our cell, he went on to become prime minister and then vicepresident, just a skip away from being absolute dictator.

      When these events came to pass, it had been long since I had parted company with Sundance--in fact Costaguana had parted company with me--and I don't know how he took them, although I am sure it was with his chin up. Even Dare, come to think of it, was not a leftist but a Mussolini copy-cat, in which he was not very different from the Apocrisiary, who, as we saw in one of his early Avatars in these memoirs, took the Italian dictator as his role model on how a marriage should be organized. I am not even sure now I was a leftist, for it is hard to believe in retrospect that I could have accepted the nonsense that went on in the meetings of our cell.

      One thing I remember is that we did a lot of talking, or rather, they did, because I never could square what I wanted to say with what they were saying, which I was supposedly accepting as valid or at least minimally coherent. For instance, we did endless political analyses, which to me were as interesting as a congress of chiropractors, and talked volumes on political strategy. This was clever because we had no political strategy. That is to say, Lakas, Old Shoot, and our occasional visitor, the opportunist Lockjaw--Assuage was mainly concerned with a pig farm he had for which I lent him some money he never paid back--were longing for political comebacks, but Sundance apparently believed they had already made it by joining his cell. That was not their belief. The drunkard stuck around because he liked drinking and he and I often adjourned to a bar. The lawyer did because he actually believed that Sundance was his political ace in the hole. About the opportunist, I have already told all there is to tell. So basically, talk of strategy among us was a fudge: we always agreed to meet again and on occasions we went on trips to the interior where we were offered these bountiful breakfasts and we founded groups that met once, resolved to meet again, and disappeared. I did at least enjoy the breakfasts which usually included succulent, white-fleshed river fish.

And as to ideology, what could I say that these guys didn't already know? That socialism was great stuff? Or that Marx was one helluva guy?

From the political analyses and the strategy sessions, it would have been impossible to tell that we were leftist revolutionaries. Ideological questions came up when the participants recalled the heady days when they were more confused than they were now, the big difference being that formerly they were quite open about wanting to get their mitts on the oil money and now they couldn't even dream about it. I wasn't around then, so my participation in their reminiscences was necessarily restricted, and as to future strategy I was in favour of bold decisions, which I was expecting from Sundance, who was reluctant to make any. So when my turn to speak came, seeing the fudge I was in, I hemmed and hawed a lot not sure I wouldn't be making statements that didn't rhyme and I would be subjected to the sort of ill-mannered criticism I received when I tried to do couplets with the ukulele player. And as to ideology, what could I say that these guys didn't already know? That socialism was great stuff? Or that Marx was one helluva guy? I remember the time they were talking about Mao Zedong taking over Chile and I reminded them that China wasn't next door to Chile. They scorned me so badly they could only manage guffaws, which they might have had the decency to swallow, but didn't, when Mao was not around when Allende really needed him.

      What I wanted was to transcend the nitpicking of analyses and of strategies that went no where and this I knew I could only do in print, where no one was going make me write that China and Chile were about to merge. As I was such an avid reader, I held fast to the belief that dotting your i's and crossing your t's was enough to over-awe people and get them on your side. The evidence I have on this issue from direct political experience gives grounds for a resounding: "Don't know but not very likely".

      During and immediately after the flying and Gina crises, I hung on for dear life's sake to my political connections and to my literary column in the magazine, both of which I owed ultimately to Gina. It was after I had settled down in another apartment, separated or divorced or whatever it was from her, that I began to expand into free-lancing, mostly for the magazine. I don't remember much of what I wrote, mainly because it is not worth remembering. Some of the stuff was invented, like a piece on hired killers. One on upscale orgies I based on my Gina-fantasies, which might just have led me to seek a reconciliation but for the report I got she was already seeing another man. The surprising thing would have been that she wasn't.

      In my free-lance work I used a pseudonym but I was building a reputation with my literary column and the people that read it also knew about the pseudonym. In essence, I went back to hacking, and to dissimulating, because the magazine wasn't going to put up with a leftist freeloader, any more than Piney had in the daily, and the upshot was I longed to have a mouthpiece I could call my own. Even though I was very productive, I knew I couldn't do the job alone apart from having no intention of sinking funds for salaries into such a project, which could give some idea of the considerable extent of my non-commitment to the revolutionary cause.

      The commitment was there to some extent nevertheless and since my colleagues were smug in their determination to hog the analysis-cum-strategy cell sessions, I went them one better with a pamphlet in which I tried to give Marxism some kind of nationalist significance, which was a double-barrelled falsehood as I neither believed in Marxism nor in nationalism. Lest I be diagnosed mad before all the evidence is in, allow me to explain that Marxist nationalism or nationalist Marxism (whichever way didn't matter) was the label and the catchphrase I used to express more heart-felt opinions, such as that capitalism was greedy and corrupt and should be replaced by a new social order that was generous and honest, by which I meant not in countries that were doing quite well with capitalism, thank you, but in countries that were not doing well at all.

You could tell he was a dirty, double-dealing, back-stabbing hypocrite from the way he lowered his gaze and gave you a resentful look, as if you were about to step on  his toes or something worse

The thing is that for a couple of sessions our cell had to hear me out instead of me having to hear my smarty-pants colleagues and their analysis-and-strategy horseshit, and this experience made me ambitious for further glory. The opportunity arose when I was told of a group of young, leftist, would-be journalists who were willing to give the idea of a radical, knock-'em-down-drag-'em-out journal a whirl. As I was willing to put up a scratch fund for printing costs, they agreed to meet with me and hail me as their leader. I knew this was an arrant lie as soon as I laid eyes on them but I was keen on the idea, which if it succeeded would at least provide me with the means to express my views without let or hindrance. They were in all six. For some reason they had the idea I was a pot smoker, which I wasn't, but as I did not want to chase them away, and they did look definitely like pot smokers, I was very ambiguous on the issue, by which I mean I shouted: "Long live pot", and they all exchanged knowing glances.

      They were indeed young, the oldest not being above thirty and the youngest about seventeen or eighteen with Che Guevara locks and a camera. They had among them different talents, but all, save the lay out artist, wanted to write, which was not a talent they shared equally. Richard Plackboard, the long-haired photographer, for instance, wouldn't have recognized a sentence if he himself had written one, which he never could in the time I knew him. Surprisingly or fittingly, of this group it was Plackboard who later became a bald millionaire magazine editor in Miami with a website visited by hordes of TV executives. His story is fascinating but I am not sure it is apposite. Suffice it to say he tumbled to the internet while he was doing PR for a singer called Lion Lover and immediately realized he could make money from it.

      Now, as to the leader of this disparate group, he was exactly what the rhymester Juggy Moran had called me, and then some--a dirty, double-dealing, back-stabbing hypocrite--and you could tell right off from the way he smirked or lowered his gaze and gave you a resentful look, as if you were about to step on his toes or something worse. He was one untrustworthy son of a bitch and I would have put a lot of deep, clear water between us if, for some reason I never fathomed, he hadn't had the others in the palm of his hand.

      Apart from Plackboard and Snake-in-the-Grass, the others were: Luke Garrigue, the page designer, a fairly harmless if harebrained sort who had the idea the project was about an illustrated comic magazine like Mad (he even showed me a doodle that was a bad rip-off of Alfred E. Newman); Rol Downey, a black drifter who had a reputation as a genius, although all I noticed when I met him was his towering afro and halitosis; Henry Rounder, a short, roundish guy who looked as if he was ready to skulk at the drop of a handkerchief and whom his buddies called Little Turd, which, to my astonishment, he didn't seem to mind; and the sixth, of whom I only remember that he once posed for some photographs as a mad scientist, possibly because he lived up to his reputation as something of a man with a thousand faces. With a start like that, we were bound to be a sensation, and to my utter astonishment we were.

      The magazine was not intended, at least not by me, to be comic except as bait and ornament for my articles, which came in all sizes and were about the ills of the country and of mankind. To make this clear once and for all, I never urged socialism on anybody or in any situation and mostly tried to diagnose the lunacy that made possible the aforementioned case of the homesick cows and their underperforming udders. My colleagues were about as Marxist as Groucho, but they were very competitive about their leftier-than-thou attitude and they never completely overcame their suspicions about me. I can vouchsafe I had never found myself in a situation as fraught or as equivocal as the one I created with that magazine. Even its name, Blow-out, was weird. I chose it myself, which indicates perhaps the main source of the weirdness, and when I mentioned it in the cell, which by then had expanded to take in some very radical Christian Socialists, every one made faces as if I was offering them roadkill snacks. Notwithstanding these reactions, I stuck to my choice of names. As I was paying for the printer and I had gotten the idea for the magazine in the first place to show my cell-buddies I knew more than they ever would, I never even thought of taking their advice seriously for one instant. Dare was impassive even though I am sure he wanted to throw up with the others, so later, when the magazine became a success, he could claim he was behind it all.

My colleagues' anti-clericalism was of the sort that made sex-starved Spanish Republicans so delirious they would go out and rape nuns, or so the nuns claimed

To give him his due, Sundance was a fairly well known personality and the first issue of Blow-out--the reference was to oil wells and to revolution--featured excerpts from a book of his which was about to be published. They were supposed to be the results of his prolonged and laborious research into corporate holdings intended to underpin Marx's theory of capitalist concentration and centralization, but I knew his information was mostly gossip from a rich buddy of his who wanted to get back at some business rivals. Dare's work was not very reliable where it tried to be informational and not very informational in the parts where it was reliable. It contained a lot of hearsay and its few revelations about new fortunes later proved hazardous for the people it mentioned, some of whom became the object of kidnapping attempts. This was never my intention and all I wanted and got out of Dare's work was some public notoriety for the magazine.

      I personally, as opposed to the magazine's managing editor, which I wasn't for long, made a few tiny international waves and for a time I contributed short pieces under another name to the now-defunct Biweekly Review, a Marxist publication principally about communist and so-called developing countries with two unbeatable claims on fame: it had the most remarkable prestige-to-circulation ratio ever--Blow-out in a domestic market sold many more copies than Biweekly Review, which was addressed to the world--and it never came across a dumb idea on underdevelopment it did not publish. But I am afraid I am being unfair and I must say of its editors, as of Sundance, that they were well-meaning and compassionate and it is just too bad that at the height of their careers mankind was still close to the time when capitalism and even Western Civilization came closest to foundering, which, so as not to put too fine a point on this appraisal, was not really that close.

      Even as I write this, it comes to my mind that the problem with Blow-out, as with my entire political career, is embodied in the previous sentence, in which I try to sympathize with Marxists but at the same time I do not want to be carried away by my sympathy. The predictable result was a form of induced political paraplegia. I have asked myself many times if it could have been otherwise, not just about these events but also about those that came after I closed the political chapter in my life, and I always answer myself in the negative, but I can never muster sufficient conviction to stifle the damn question once and for all.

      Be that as it may, while I struggled with my conscience, my fellow workers in the magazine, each of whom had taken over some department or other, were having a high old time. Their ideas on political protest were quite different from mine. I was attached to the printed word and I wanted above all to introduce clarity into social issues through which I could say to the readers: "See, this is demonstrably true, and see, that is demonstrably expensive milk". But my co-workers were interested in other things. They wanted satire but they went in for some out-of-date routines, like collages with talking puppets to demonstrate the power of manipulation--creatively they were still in the age of Kukla, Fran, and Ollie--or vulgar third-rate anti-clericalism of the sort in which the scene at Golgotha is reinterpreted so that all the characters appear to be reacting to a fart that Christ blew. I did not want to be associated to stuff like this, which went back to the Goliards and was the kind of vulgarity that made sex-starved Spanish Republicans so delirious they would go out and rape nuns, or so the nuns claimed.

      There were a few complications. Blow-out sold like Viagra, but I couldn't say whether it was because of my articles or because of their to me not-very-funny and unoriginal skits. What I think in the balance made us was the irreverence, but there again I cannot be sure who was perceived by our public as its main exponent. I did not place much trust in our readers' intelligence, which is why I liked using concrete examples, like cows, and this meant that our publication could be in a state of precarious equilibrium I dared not tamper with.

      Another reason I could not avoid the unsavoury association with my young colleagues was that I could do nothing about it short of having my name deleted from the masthead and this would have resulted in excluding myself from using the monster I had created. What had happened was that once Blow-out was able to cover its own expenses, the scheming, ungrateful, traitorous Snake-in-the-Grass who had taken over the day-to-day management of the magazine, the eyes-averted, ignorant, pseudo-Marxist intriguer who led the others, staged an internal coup d'état and had me removed as managing editor and substituted by an editorial board in which I did not even figure at the top but in alphabetical order including Little Turd and the stooge who posed as a mad scientist or as anything our juvenile head of photography told him to impersonate. I should have resigned then and there but I had gotten fond of lambasting the "establishment". Besides, in what could only have been interpreted as a left-handed tribute, the plotters did not give me the heave ho, which they could have, and instead became conciliatory and encouraged me to go on venting my spleen and even came for advice and orientation when the authorities made threatening noises and their dogs began sniffing near and around us. And, modesty aside, they were right in not rejecting me outright, for it was I who on various occasions maneuvered to keep the enemy at bay. Even if Snake-in-the-Grass had wanted to eject me, I think the others would not have let him, because ironically I had become a kind of father-figure to them, which, with my own background, was the last role I would have thought I could have dipped into. In any event, journalism wasn't new to me and the road I had to travel was not the one that Blow-out offered but that of politics.

The American strategy against Castro was as if during the Berlin Blockade the Allies had airlifted the entire population out instead of airlifting supplies in

I was still a member in good standing of Sundance's cell, but I knew this was mostly play-acting, although I never went and told him so. Dare was supportive and especially he bragged a lot about how he was my intellectual "godfather" and I did not want to disillusion him. However, he was not the only one who had an eye on the magazine. The others interested in it were the ex-commies, so-called socialists. They were interested enough to want to recruit me into their party, which wasn't that much bigger than Sundance's cell, but it was bigger. They took me at my word that I was for the common man or the working man or the downtrodden, although they shouldn't have because I myself wasn't quite clear on how I could characterize the people I was for, as against knowing quite well I hated the arrogant and the corrupt and especially the incompetent. These fors and againsts raised important issues.

      Was it the common man or the working man I supported? Since I did not believe in Marx, who was for the working man, though not in a personal way but as an instrument of history, to which he said he had discovered the key, I was not necessarily for the working man, who anyway in my view was much better off than the non-working man. On the other hand, I knew plenty of quite ordinary men and women, as common as they came, and I did not necessarily like or dislike them, so in all honesty it could hardly have been for the common man I was for either. Finally, there was the "downtrodden" and that had just about the perfect degree of abstraction and ambivalence to fit the bill for me. I was definitely, yes, for the downtrodden. There was one difficulty and that was the problem that the downtrodden could also mean the no-talents and no one in his right mind wants to belong to a party of no-talents, who are probably resentful and quarrelsome and bloody-minded when they are not apathetic precisely because they have no talent. So I really didn't know what I was for in terms of defining the people I wanted to be identified with.

      Nevertheless, I was quite open to the love-you postcards I was getting from the communists/socialists, whose ambiguous designation needs to be briefly explained. To the indignation of the people, the commies, who were per se not popular, had made themselves even less so by acting as if they were, which they did in imitation of Castro, who was then very popular. A group of communists then decided their best shot at popularity was to stop using the name communist and to start calling themselves socialists, which wasn't about to fool any one or increase their popular standing one whit. The change of name did indicate they were through with their Castroite leanings and that was right up my alley because, even though I was still very much for the Cuban Revolution, I did not believe that Castro's red-rabbit-out-of-a-hat act could be repeated.

      I was a frequent visitor to Havana and I was certain that Castro's political game plan was inapplicable outside of Cuba because it required the wholesale cooperation and support of the American government and not every country had the dual privilege of being next to the United States and inciting a hatred so intense in Washington it almost seemed like romance. It was as if Castro had been offered a media-star contract, which he spurned in favour of Soviet television. This infuriated the Americans who supported an invasion of Cuba through the Bay of Pigs to a beach surrounded by swamps, chosen as an ideal landing site during brainstorming sessions between the CIA and the leaders of the exiled Cuban community. The swamps were infested by cocrodiles being raised by Castro in another one of his failed schemes to invade the French market. The exiled Cuban community had been growing by leaps and bounds, especially after Castro did the switcheroo on the Americans, who figured they would improve the chances of toppling Castro by inviting every one in Cuba who could do it to settle in Miami, another indication of the acute case of collective neurosis afflicting foreign-policy makers in Washington. It was as if during the Berlin Blockade the Allies had airlifted the entire population out instead of airlifting supplies in.

      I had no means of knowing whether Cubans were doing the right things, as opposed to Americans doing all the wrong ones, but I was delighted by their contempt for capitalist values. I was also impressed by the vision, which was Guevara's doing, of a fully industrialized and prosperous Cuban economy in less time than it took Fidel Castro to make a really long speech, although I did think Guevara overdid it by treating money as if it were little more than toilet paper. Even to a prime greed-hater like me, it was too much like tempting fate.

I could almost hear the gnashing of teeth of Snake-in-the-Grass when I was offered the privilege of standing as candidate for Congress in the new socialist movement

Back where I lived, the new band of communist-turned-socialist brothers had a strong dual leadership. The top man, Crassus Pompier, was a veteran of many political struggles in ill-lit apartments. His nom de guerre, Gun Kaualauna, which suggested that he was something of an ukulele player who also knew how to use a revolver, was probably as well known as his proper name. The other top man, Ted Toffit, a close second to the armed ukulele player, had built a reputation as both deep thinker and dashing man of action. He was the darling of the intelligentsia and he attracted top-caliber foreign backers, such as the Greek composer Koyaanisqatsi, who made a catchy ditty for the new movement's motto--some obviously fictitous claim to inordinate popularity--and the famous Colombian novelist who wrote the motto and coined for it the phrase magical realism, apt enough with the emphasis on magical. Toffit's fame as a deep-thinker rested on a book he wrote, and I reviewed favourably, about the Prague Spring. It was long and tedious and had nothing to do with Czechoslovakia but with his own grand idea for substituting socialism for communism. He thought that using the Czech reference would be chic and my co-editors at Blow-out did spend many happy hours parsing the book and feeling very serious about their politics. I did not do myself any favours in their eyes by suggesting that they satirize it, which is one of the reasons they could have sworn to a man I was an agent of imperialism.

      Despite their awesome satiric powers, their opinions carried little weight in socialist circles, next to mine anyway, and I could almost hear the gnashing of teeth of Snake-in-the-Grass when I was offered the privilege of standing as candidate for Congress in the new socialist movement. This was probably the result of an article I wrote in which looking at all possible options open to a committed leftist, the more realistic one was to enter the electoral fray and try to go for power, which was only a way of speaking because the chances of this were as good as a toy poodle's in a busy speedway.

      My article was motivated significantly by what had happened in Sundance's cell. The coming elections were the opportunity fat lawyer Lakas was waiting for, the only reason why he had accepted induction as one of Dare's unconditionals, which in a sense he was and he was not. This paradox is easily explained: he believed unconditionally that Sundance had such oratorical gifts and such charisma that he alone was capable of garnering the masses' support--lefties always spoke of the "masses", for the self-evident reason that talk is cheap--but Lakas' unconditionality was conditioned on his being able to use Dare for his own political ends, which, reasonably enough, were to have a modicum of political power. Maybe he had other motives, but this was what he made explicit, although he did not speak of power for himself but for the "masses". It was all quite semiotical.

      Now, Sundance was both foolish and shrewd or maybe, as I said, just habitually confused. He had a high opinion of himself, so high he expected unconditionality from others, but when it came to politics he didn't know what to do with himself although he knew it wasn't to do the fat lawyer's bidding. My initial dips into politics were the disappointing analysis-and-strategy bull sessions, but I wasn't dumb enough to believe that was all there was to it. I naturally supposed that I would be seeing some sort of action, which was not likely in our political cell, and this was precisely what I was now being offered on a platter by the newly hatched socialists.

When confronted by an expectant crowd of potential voters I felt a strong urge to insult them

Action implied the necessity of some contributory abilities on my part, for it was obvious that I wasn't going to win a lottery without having even paid for a ticket. One of those abilities had to be public speaking and to be quite honest I was very mediocre in that area. I had the same weak vocal chords as the Apocrisiary and due to the accidents of my upbringing under him I was always on the lookout for strong challenges to anything I said, so when I was confronted by an expectant crowd of potential voters I wanted either to insult them, which wasn't good politics, or I wasn't sure about what I wanted to say, with the result that I stammered and went back and forth and my endings tended to be lame, except the time I was invited to address a group of fanatical Arabs and I concluded about five minutes of intellectual meanderings by shouting: "Long live free Palestine!", which sent them into such a frenzy I could have thought they wanted to make me dictator right there and then. This is by way of saying that like Lakas I too wanted to use Sundance--basically, because I lacked his oratorical gifts--and it shocked us to see him, as electioneering time approached, start acting like a Vestal or a nun, more interested in defending his purity than in practical politics. In sum, Sundance was in favor of electoral abstention to show the political world what principled honesty and loyalty to one's beliefs really meant. I might have been a political novice, but I knew as sure as breathing the political world was corrupt and disloyal and that was precisely the last message they wanted to hear. Since publicity in politics was in direct proportion to activism (plus money, of which we had none), it was obvious that we weren't going to be getting much publicity, apart of course from Blow-out, whose allegiance to abstentionism I could not guarantee and was far from wanting to promote.

      The muted cross-currents in the cell finally clashed the night Lakas openly challenged Sundance to make up his mind about what we were going to do and he, who did not want to lose the fat lawyer but did not want to be pushed around by him either, mumbled something about his preference for a more subtle political strategy involving some undefined political program to the effect that politics were dirty and that it was better to follow a course which did not actively pursue political power, which did not entail that said course excluded pushing for political change, and so on. That he managed to sound coherent is the last and best homage I can render old Sundance. Lakas shook his head sadly and left the cell for good. Since Old Shoot wasn't very helpful and Assuage was mostly busy with his pigs and, to put it briefly, every one thought that Sundance was skidding, the cell was reduced to the two us. In desperation, he finally decided to mumble to my face that I was either for him or against him. I mumbled "yes" but gave him my answer in the article which got me nominated socialist candidate. Thus, I embarked on a real political career and not the make-believe of our simon-pure but pathetic little discussion group.

      My nomination was not exactly a gift without strings. I was nominated in a constituency in which my rival on the left was a local who had once been hugely popular but had forfeited much of his popularity by going radical. My socialists were invading his turf, which wasn't really his anyway, for the parties to the right of us were in the ascendant and they weren't going to take lefties lying down, so for us it was going to be uphill all the way. I knew this, and maybe I should have returned this poisoned apple to my sponsors and wished them "Bon appetit!", but I was committed to dipping, and wasn't this mock-opportunity precisely what I was looking for, a commitment that did not commit me to anything much? These thoughts, however, were not foremost in my mind when I started campaigning. As is my habit in these memoirs, I will not overburden the reader with a plethora of unnecessary details but go for fundamental events that define the experience and its results.

      My baptism of fire came in a radio interview in which I thought I was going to be asked questions about ideas and issues and my host kicked off the proceedings by accusing me of being a hypocrite and a "foreigner". The hypocrisy had to do with my having owned a plane, to which I should have replied that it was not an issue, but instead made some weak arguments about having been a working pilot, which my inconsiderate Gestapo interrogator scoffed at as "unlikely" and insisted I should have spent the money the plane cost me on food for the poor. He went on to other similar drivel, including the accusation of foreignness, which to my relief (for that really was a potential issue) had to do with my having been selected as candidate rather than elected through a primary or some other democratic means. I had not expected so much rudeness and I did not counterattack with enough force, so the local socialist committeemen called headquarters and complained that they had been sent a dummy. This came on top of their suspicions about my bourgeois origins, which they noticed when I used knife and fork instead of just a spoon, and it did nothing to improve my relations with them. In fact, these were so bad that I wasn't even invited to their gatherings, which I only joined when I stumbled upon them and they grudgingly refrained from telling me to go away.

I had not still resolved whether I was for the common man, the working man, or the downtrodden, but I knew I hated Freddy Nukes

It was tacitly arranged that my contacts with the local socialists would be channelled through Toffit, whom every one revered. This arrangement was an additional reason why my participation in socialist debates was severely restricted. By "additional" I mean I was still afflicted by the inhibitory forces I experienced in the cell having to do with my total disinterest in political analysis that did not involve questions of principles, on which however there was little I could contribute that was not already common knowledge, such as the historically ordained role of socialists to rule in the name of either the working man, the common man, or the downtrodden, a multiple choice issue I had still not fully resolved.

      On the question of strategy, which was such a fudge in the cell, there was no disagreement in the socialist camp about the basic premise of winning the election, but since it was obvious the local committee was not prepared to take guidance from me, I assumed I had to make my own strategy decisions. Besides, from some of the meetings I had attended I had the feeling I did not want to attend any more of them even if I had been invited. One in particular, in which Toffit was present, sticks in my mind.

      It was a very long evening during which every one was talking desultorily about nothing in particular and I was keeping quiet not sure about which part of the aimless debate to enter and prove I could actually talk. However, it became so obvious they were just making purposeless talk that I finally got up and left. Dear Reader might well be wondering how I could reconcile my immersion in politics with the irrational behaviour of politicians and political workers--an incompatibility which, as I hated our party headquarters as dirty, ugly, and unkempt, was worse than I have made it seem so far--and the explanation is that my interest in politics at that stage was in getting elected and since my nomination was not about to be reversed I couldn't care less what the others were blabbing about.

      Anyway, next day I had a talk with Toffit and asked him how the session had ended. He explained quite openly that after I had left they had gotten down to brass tacks. The burning issue from which they wanted me excluded had to do with a very macho comrade, Pedro Urea, who was not happy about having a comrade-in-arms whom he accused of being a homosexual. I was astounded. Also, I understood they had been waiting for me to leave because despite my habitual indifference to their discussions, they probably suspected I would have taken an uncomradely stance on that particular issue, like saying that if they were socialists cows could fly and pigs could talk. As I was still very much an idealist, my shock was unbounded when Toffit informed me that instead of calling Urea out of order the socialist commiteemen had decided to expel the gay socialist. That did it for me and their meetings, which afterwards I shunned and would not have attended even if they had been willing to sing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" every time I showed my face.

      I will say for Toffit that he could be brutal in his honesty, although this was not so much because of unswerving devotion to truth as because he thought he was well above most mortals. In sum, he did not give a damn what I thought, and to be truthful I didn't give a damn what he thought either, and I got a chance to retribute his airs of superiority later when I commended him on the favour he had done our ex-colleague, the gay socialist, who after being expelled from the movement joined our rightist opponents and was later named Costaguanan ambassador to Persia. As to Urea, he ended up making ends end meet by playing the mandolin at birthday parties and weddings, where he was also some times asked to give non-political speeches.

And talking of speeches, here was an activity in which I could not avoid working together with the committee, even with the homophobic mandolin player Urea. Our socialist movement had some grand orators, although none in the same category as Sundance. The co-founders of the movement, Pompier and Toffit, were commanding presences in any public arena. They did have a would-be rival within the movement itself, Freddy Nukes, but you could tell he was a phony because he insisted that they build high platforms from which the twaddle he emitted sounded like words and, since the public at such events had to be party faithful, they knew it was time to cheer because Nukes would occasionally heighten the volume of the incoherent sounds he was making.

My own speech-making career, as was to be expected, had its ups and downs. I was good in one-on-one debate--except on the occasion I got bushwhacked by the inconsiderate Gestapo interrogator on the radio--but my efforts at public speaking left much to be desired. When I made a speech, my first tack was the socialist program, which I wasn't too comfortable with because it had a lot of policy statements but did not once mention the efficient application of policy, my particular bugbear. Exactly how I could square my own quest for power with a platform I found unsatisfactory might have to do either with blind ambition or a visceral indifference to the political scene and the spectacle of humanity in general, although neurosis, however contradictory this may sound, was an obviously more rational alternative explanation. But my deep down apathy cannot be underestimated either and it could be plausibly argued that if I was dipping into politics it was entirely due to the necessity for engaging in some sort of activity to while away my allotted time of life. But let's not be so trifling about these things, which at the time loomed much larger than they do now.

It was difficult enough defining socialism and economic backwardness without having to define panacea

Since policy then was not my forte, I tried ideology, where I tended to get bogged down when the really complex points had to be elaborated. I attempted to explain why socialism was the panacea for underdevelopment. This was not as easy as it sounds. It involved expounding the concept itself of socialism, on which I had to tread carefully because I did not see eye-to-eye with my detested comrades who would have quickly blown the whistle on me if they had discovered any signs of deviation from the movement's program. It must be remembered they had been communists long before they had been re-baptized socialist by Toffit and Pompier. After expounding the concept of socialism, my ideological exposition required expatiating on economic backwardness, which I attributed to ignorance and incompetence, social traits the program did not mention for fear of offending ignorant and incompetent voters. To round things out, I had to relate specifically both main themes to each other, which was difficult enough without having to define panacea, with the result that people would either drift away or ask out loud: "What's he going on about?" In the end I opted for insulting bureaucrats, which didn't go over big either because in my audiences those who knew what a bureaucrat was usually wanted to become one.

      When I finished a speech I tried to mingle with the crowd but I couldn't because it was always thin on the ground and every one I approached got out of my way very quickly. When I tried casually to sit next to people, which was overdoing it on my part, they looked at me as if I was a dog looking for an upright to piss on and unceremoniously moved away as far as possible. Urea was much more self-assured and eloquent in his speeches, but he wasn't drawing large crowds either. Given these shortcomings, I concluded that our problem was a lack of grassroots and I decided to go to work at that level.

      Before giving an account of my efforts, I should say something on Blow-out, ungratefully neglected for these political anecdotes, which were only possible through my connection with the magazine. We left Snake-in-the-Grass with a bad case of bruxitis because I had been made socialist candidate and he wasn't even asked to join the movement as a dues-paying member. He might have been considering another coup d'état or even a really outrageous defamation campaign--although I didn't know what could be worse in his estimation than my agent-of-imperialism or in-the-employ-of-the-CIA tags--but it wasn't necessary because my departure to take up political responsibilities allowed him to gather unto himself all the functions of a managing editor without having me as a troublesome father-figure for the other members of his gang. Snake-in-the-Grass proceeded to make Blow-out more Marxist than ever, which he did by lifting a lot of stuff from whatever Marxist book was in vogue. Also, he kept up the satiric vein, which was very dependent on Garrigue. They made a big deal of Donald Duck and the gang cooperated gleefully applying the name to reactionaries in ingenious ways such as: "Politician So-and-So is a real Donald Duck", or: "The laws Congress is approving are worthy of Donald Duck". Although it might not need explaining, the commie hatred of the Walt Disney character was misplaced, because Donald Duck was just a barnyard bird with an attitude problem (possibly having to do with his sailor suit) and anyway the cartoon capitalist culprit was his uncle Scrooge McDuck and Donald Duck only became the scapegoat because he was by far the most famous of the two.

      Another idea they hammered to death was that the "veins of Latin America" had been cut open by imperialism and the entire region was bleeding to death. More likely, as has become apparent over the years, the population that could was fleeing to the heartland of imperialism, to be depicted in movies as flat-faced, criminally-inclined perverts. The open-veins thesis was pure dependency theory, but my colleagues didn't know the difference between what Marx said and what others considered that Marx should have said. Since Marx had not been around to make pronouncements on whether his ideas were consistent with economic imperialism, Marxists could say anything they wanted, although the more-enlightened consensus held that the dependency thesis was not the real McCoy and it became identified with Marxism only because Lenin espoused it and he made sure it became a popular Marxist cause. The instrument for this had been the famous Comintern, which was the Trotsky-inspired international forum for all communist parties. Stalin later used it to have Trotsky's brain trepanned by a pick axe. The author of this deed was pretty despicable--in order to operate on Trotsky from the back, he befriended him and even worked as his secretary for free--but for many Marxists intellectuals I met at the time he embodied a genuine case of conscience, as if getting drunk and beating your wife to a pulp was something you could do out of the goodness of your heart.

      Getting back to Snake-in-the-Grass and his serpentarium troupe, they were just doing the same thing over and over and they were quickly running out of ideas whereas I kept sending them articles which, if not always original, were at least on different subjects. As Blow-out's circulation kept on increasing, I could have believed I was the power behind its popularity but I made no such inference because my opinion of its readers had not improved and anyway I no longer felt that committed to the magazine, which is most ironic considering what later happened to it.

Upon reading my critique of Marxism, Pompier suggested I eat my words and Toffit warned me never to get close to a real Marxist thinker if I did not wish to be seriously mangled

In part I became more indifferent to Blow-out because I was also engaged in more ambitious writing projects having to do with the real nature of revolution and its significance for the "downtrodden". I was trying to make sense of my own experience and why I believed it was pertinent in a wide context of political action, which sounded very well but was not meant to comply with what the local gods of socialism believed. I wrote a book-length history of the Vietnam War in which I exalted its exemplary value for other peoples aspiring to progress and dignity. And this was precisely the problem. It was factually accurate and the narrative did not dawdle, but the bibliography was scant and the text had the constant background drone of an editorial. I read it a couple of times after it was finished and in the end consigned it to a drawer, an unheralded personal homage to a "good cause", neither of which exists anymore. That project and its fate contain an unspoken comment on the ultimate value of individual human efforts, the sadness of which I have tried to mitigate in these memoirs, not in themselves the unbridled raves of hyperkinetic, youthful optimism.

      I also wrote most of a book on the contents and grounds of world revolution, which formed a diptych with the book on Vietnam. What I was attempting with those two works was the expression of a history-based world-revolutionary program--perhaps better called post-revolutionary, as in post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-deconstructivism, etc.--which did away with none other than Karl Marx himself! Given that the setbacks suffered by communism (to put it mildly) have still not dampened the Marxist ardour of millions all over the world, including countless normal-seeming educators and theoreticians, my proposed objective then could have justified in the eyes of many an enquiry into the possibility that I could be terminally deranged.

      In the event, all that ensued was that I showed a draft to the co-founders of socialism and co-sponsors of my candidacy and their reactions were surprisingly low-key: Pompier suggested I eat my words and Toffit warned me never to get close to a real Marxist thinker if I did not wish to be seriously mangled. Needless to say, their dire words did nothing to alter my views but I did realize that, in the state the world was in, considering further my lack of oratorical gifts, and particularly realizing that I was in politics for the heck of it rather than out a heart-felt willingness to face a firing squad for my convictions, I decided I might as well shelve that manuscript too. The potentially world-shaking diptych never saw the light, although it did at least serve as the platform for further reflections on social issues. These were conclusive in respect to my political dippings and it could be argued that my post-revolutionary musings, in so far as they have led to these reflections, were not entirely useless, unless of course these reflections also turn out to be useless.

      The world of ideas in which I lived most of the time was quite separate from the political hustings I was working. My search for grassroots was contemporaneous with my unorthodox intellectual pursuits and it went on without any ill effects from the downbeat advice I got from my socialist patrons. My break came when I heard that a family who supported our cause wanted logistical and other help. I immediately volunteered and practically moved to their place where I set up my very own campaign headquarters. The family was large and owned an extensive property with fruit trees and wooden dugouts they filled with earth to grow pulses. My recollections from that time do not compare to the happies the pregnant-lagoon afternoon and the Benares-hotel night are, because there was the pressure of politics and my nagging desire to do well, but they are alright in parts, like the dappled shade under the trees and the pleasant laziness sitting and taking in the breeze before doing the propaganda rounds.

      I had a four-wheel drive car which was fitted with speakers from which we broadcast around the neighborhood, a rather extensive one, the virtues of socialism and how happy every one would eventually be if they voted for us, a message about which I had serious reservations. There were, on a very basic level, my philosophical doubts about happiness itself, which of course I had to put under a tight lid as it would have been unadvisable to make a pitch that said, for instance: "Hey, voters, if you're thinking about happiness, you probably still believe in a free lunch". Alternatively: "Hey, voters, if you think you're unhappy, wait till you hear my story." As there was not a chance I would ever get that spontaneous, my real worry was that, since people did have this preposterous tendency to believe in something they called happiness, they could reason that if voting was the condition for being happy, then instead of plumping for our highly improbable electoral triumph, they should vote for a more likely winner. This discouraging train of thought was based on the absence of rahs during our vote-gathering excursions and on the thought that, despite our own shortcomings, we were better equipped in our neigborhood than in the dozens of others we were not canvassing.

There was even a poster of a rather good-looking me striding forward mouth defiantly proclaiming our popularity one arm upraised to show a clenched fist holding a hacksaw

I saw defeat staring me in the face, but the incentive for being a quitter was doing nothing or going back to the magazine and Snake-in-the-Grass and these prospects were not cheery. There was always the problem of my neurosis, but I had concluded long ago that before I could tackle it with full force I had to do a lot of living and this did not include not being exposed to risks and losses. You could say I had to take the big risk of suffering defeat before I could even think of being a winner. This was not the type of calculation to launch a person on a full time career but it was the best I could do.

      There was also the long-shot chance of winning, in which case I was not certain of what exactly I would do, but I imagined opportunities were more likely to arise in those circumstances than they would as I was. To increase my chances for future opportunities, therefore, I lobbied for the active campaigning presence of Great Socialist Gods in our midst and they responded on various occasions. Barring Freddy Nukes, they were welcome and I swallowed my intellectual pride and acted as presenter--this meant I had to say a few words about how great they were before they spoke--and escorted them to the neighborhoods I was not covering with my speakers-accoutred vehicle and did as if I really were a campaigner and knocked on doors and shook dirty hands I did not want to shake and winked at old ladies who scowled back and even tried my hand at being popular and witty, which left many people perplexed or wondering whether I was a con man trying to get them to fall for a line, which they were certainly not about to do.

      Despite many pratfalls and the suspicions that the over-enthusiastic normally arouse, I can boast that I became fairly adept at campaigning and gained some experience debating if not orating. I also wrote articles for local sheets and there was even a poster of a rather good-looking me patterned on the national symbol of socialism rampant which was a man striding forward mouth defiantly proclaiming our popularity one arm upraised to show a clenched fist holding a hacksaw. The latter I think symbolized how we would shed our chains.

      Not long before election day, I was invited once again to the same radio program whose host had initiated my political career by calling me a hypocrite, but this time I was so prepared for him I hogged the entire hour the program lasted and hardly let him speak and in fact, even though no one could see this, I had him squirming in his seat and gesturing with his hands either pleading with me to take it easy or expressing regret for having invited me back. All to no avail! After the votes were counted, I had lost. This was not unexpected. What was not expected was our creditable showing which was a better than hoped for third place besting by a good margin every rival on the left.

      The big disappointment, and a landmark in the evolution of my political thinking, was the winning presidential candidate, Andrew Cap, a big loudmouth with a dubious background as an abettor of torturers whose right-hand man and lap dog was the dandy Ding Arry, who chose his wardrobe. Despite insistent pre-election polls, I refused to believe the citizenry would be so besotted as to elect such a man and I felt much more crushed when this happened than about my own electoral defeat, on which after all I had had few illusions. What I ignored in my calculations was the collective belief that, with so much unearned oil income gushing around, surely every one was entitled to a cut. If it wasn't forthcoming in the form of subsidies and salaries for doing nothing, it was because of corruption in high places, which was unavoidable, so the safest bet was to go for tried-and-true winners, and that's how Whip-'em-Good--this was Cap's electoral nickname, which stuck--came across to people. The only consolation lay in sic transit gloria, for I knew that President Whip-'em-Good would eventually get his comeuppance, which he did ironically as a result of a popular backlash when for once in his life he tried to apply sensible policies, although not before his Pomeranian and make up man Arry stole enough money to have his personal Lear Jet and retire to New York.

      My own political fortunes went from bad to worse. In charge of Blow-out, Snake-in-the-Grass was fast running out of ideas. Towards the end of the electoral campaign I had ceased collaborating altogether. But I had neglected to have my name removed from the editorial board. In my total absence, Snake-in-the-Grass and his followers went and really radicalized the journal. Their satire, as unfunny as usual, became heavy-handed. It was abstract denunciation interlarded with cries for revolution. Considering themselves ideologically pure Little Lord Fauntleroys, they skirted libel and then just started crossing the line habitually.

      Circulation had begun descending and the magazine's barbs were about as fearsome as a furious ant. Then Little Turd came up with a brilliant piece about homosexuality in the barracks and the lay-out man outdid himself with a montage of a helmeted head on a streetwalker's body. There was nothing radical or even political about this. And statistically there was no gainsaying that some soldiers had to be gay. But there was a new government headed by President Whip'em-Good with an awesome popular mandate and the military were riled enough to get permission to institute legal proceedings against the members of the magazine's editorial board. What this meant was that a group of civilians who had nothing to do with the article in question, including me, was being accused of printing a truism depicted as a blotch on the honor of the armed forces which could only be expunged by, one, subjecting us to a court martial or, two, if a company of soldiers had signed an affidavit saying they were homosexuals, not very likely.

      Snake-in-the-Grass, who for once I could not blame, took it on the lam with a couple of other members of his gang and ended up in Chile on the eve of Pinochet's coup, hence inside the infamous football stadium where the military herded everyone they didn't like, including longhairs like the photography editor at Blow-out. My former colleagues were eventually expelled from Chile to Costaguana, as I was later to be from Costaguana to The Republic. Little Turd went underground and probably hit a sewer because he was never heard from again. The man with a thousand faces had no problems and is probably still going through his repertoire.

      I was arrested one night by two young men with skinhead haircuts. They emerged from the shadows and got my name wrong when they addressed me. I knew who they were of course and I told them I was going inside for a change of clothes and my toiletries kit. They got very offended, pulled out pistols bigger than their brains, and said: "Now". They took me to a detention center in my own car, in fact with me driving, and although I wasn't scared, to get into the mood of the occasion, when I heard the one in the back fiddling with his gun, I told him with just the right nervous quiver: "Be careful with that thing".

      I retained Lakas as my counsel. We had never had problems in Dare's cell and when he departed he went straight to a mainline non-leftist party, where he expected to recoup time lost with Sundance. I regretted my choice of counselor because when I insisted I was innocent, as I totally was, he said that technically I had broken the law. I asked in what way and he answered that the court would be the judge of that, which didn't have a legal ring to it and what was worse showed he himself was lukewarm about my defense. I had to assume he had taken my case for the publicity. I felt as if I had been thrust into a role that was not supposed to be part of my dipping into politics. Life was behaving most inconsiderately and I was not feeling chipper. The prison to which I was sent contained other innocent men. This made me think that just possibly I might have been guilty, though certainly not of what I was being accused.  Jail was not that terrible--except for the food and the hours it was served--and it gave me time to think.

The Red Guards had destroyed all the water closets in Beijing, now replaced by latrines with gravity-driven water flushers

There is no need here to flog Marxism any further. Had I ever believed in it? Probably, maybe, in any event it must have been before I read Marx and his theory of value-creation (which wasn't his) and logically made the absurd deductions I could not explain in the unpopular seminar I conducted. The gang at Blow-out thought they were pretty clever when they offered a "Practical Guide to Surplus Value" (another heist they perpetrated from some Marxist impact-book) in which they divided a hot dog's price into shares. The largest went to the wiener-maker and, according to their scheme, the vendor did not even get to keep the price of the hot dog, which was obvious because it was precisely the price of a hot dog that was being dissected. They called their presentation the "essence of Marxism". Cattle incidentally were not included: they consigned the "agrarian problem" to collective farms, although the self-reliant dairy farmers were "progressive" because they were "pioneering" the way for capitalism and its "inevitable" overthrow. The segmented hot dog explained: class division and class conflict, bourgeois infrastructure and superstructure, bourgeois oppression and exploitation (masked by spurious bourgeois legality), starvation wages and proletarian misery, ad agencies and conspicuous consumption, pet cemeteries and fake jewelry, historical materialism and materialist dialectics, dog races and beauty pageants, cigarette smoking and alcoholism, economic imperialism and underdevelopment, underpricing and overpricing, oligopoly and monopoly, the totality of history, the distinction between true and false, obesity and diarrhea, and the ultimate triumph of communism over capitalism.

      Another great journalistic ploy was their piece on "The Bill of Rights of the Sardine-eater", which damned overpricing in no uncertain terms. Overpricing could be the result of either monopoly conditions, which could also be oligopoly conditions, or cartels, or speculation by the shopkeeper. If there was a sardine monopoly, Marxist theory was spot on, which was why Stalin had Trotsky trepanned and why he exterminated politicians the way ordinary people swat mosquitoes, but if there wasn't, it was pure greed, and wasn't capitalism the breeding ground for greed, give me a break? Who could argue with that logic? I certainly didn't and the hosing I got from the co-leaders of the socialist movement about the second part of my diptych on world revolution did not evoke from me a whimper of protest.

      A Marxist then I wasn't. But I was a socialist, or I was crazy. Actually, I had been in a frenzied neurotic state for a long time, but it didn't show because it blended into the background. As I still did not have enough grounds to advance an insanity plea, I couldn't deny the accusation--and in jail my second-thoughts about my political career definitely turned into self-accusations--but my socialism was, as I have striven to show, of a special sort. It thrived on example, like that of the Vietnamese people, and it had to do with the economic inequality between nations, which was why I did not mind that others blathered while I plodded on scribbling very fast.

      In prison however it came to me that my scribblings were next to useless. Who was I writing for? The inventors of the Marxist wiener? My unappreciative socialist comrades? The huge mass of the population that had overwhelmingly elected President Whip-'em-Good and his Corrupt Pomeranian? The fact of the matter was that I didn't know who I was writing for and I didn't know either if anybody read what I was writing. But I knew what I knew which was that I was mired in backwardness and this backwardness had nothing to do with Marxist theory, which couldn't have been more mistaken if its creator had been indulging in free-flow improvisation, like the Surrealist poets back in The Republic. It had to do with the environment--I couldn't leave the Tropics out of my equation--and especially with collective bad habits, which could be called cultural determinism, but in any event derived from educational deficiencies.

      What I had observed in my political career, which encompassed also my perceptions as political pundit, was not imperialism at work, but the inevitable results of ignorance, arrogance, prejudice, hebetude, fecklessness, selfishness, smugness, and lack of personal hygiene. I don't want to revolt the reader with all the evidence for the last item in the previous list and I will only mention an incident during my incarceration.

      When I was about halfway through it, a new contingent of prisoners arrived. My previous companions were fanatical leftists. The new batch were very Che Guevara and they objected to our having each his own toilet. The predictable result was that nobody cleaned anything until each had to seat on somebody else's crap, and some, the long-hair types, didn't even mind this. Under such conditions, economic principles didn't matter a damn. Capitalism was bound to be a failure. Anything was destined to fail. I was being beset by the hobgoblin of consistency. My previous commitment to socialism was not as total as it sounded. Yet if I was once so passionate about Cuba or about Vietnam, I could not renege entirely on my previous beliefs. Or I could but I had to have strong rational grounds. I was feeling like the desperate man who held up the passengers on a flight and then bailed out in a home-made parachute. He was later found his arms and legs sticking out from the bog he had fallen into from 6,000 feet. His entire take was less than the cost of the plane ticket. My situation wasn't that bad, but sometimes that's how desperate I felt in jail. Fortunately, I had only to clean the collectivist shit for the short while before my expulsion. That lapse of time was also too short for conclusions, so I filed in my mind the doubts about the practical virtues of communism and the reasons for my disenchantment with socialism as a whole. Lest dear reader judge me too harshly for making such a big deal about toilets, allow me to bring to mind that one of the supreme achievements of the Chinese Cultural Revolution was the destruction by the Red Guards of all the water closets in Beijing and their substitution by latrines, admittedly now modernized with gravity-driven water flushers.

The Taliban were convinced democracy was a foreign breed of camel

When I took stock much later, the evidence of history had accumulated and it confirmed my worst fears about my history-based socialist/communist inclinations. The USSR under Brezhnev, as I had reason to suspect before, became congealed in its old Stalinist heritage (though less bloodily than under Stalin himself). Then it went and invaded Afghanistan to save a leftist regime, which was like going under and telling the drowning man next to you: "I gotcha, don't worry, I gotcha!" The US was prepared for this. What the Russians had done was as if a sitting duck had been singing Der Freischutz at the height of the hunting season.

      In America, Jimmy Carter's well-meaning international policies were like a hippy caught in a NYSE frenzy on a very bullish day. With the end of the Vietnam nightmare, Americans began panting for closure. Closure has come to mean funeral. It also has the vague connotation of really really knowing that no one survived an airplane crash in the middle of the ocean in which there were no drifting life rafts with people on board and all that was floating with the oily debris were selected body parts. It also connotes knowing the causes of an accident, but since there are always doubters closure never really comes. In sum, it is a lot of talk to make death seem less final, which is precisely the opposite of closure.

      In the case of recent American history, closure meant that liberalism in the United States was the singing duck stuck in a spit over a fire and the cooks were Ronald Reagan and his star assistant Oliver North. The Afghans fitted no one's idea of democracy--they themselves thought it was a foreign breed of camel--but they did oppose the Soviets and were given Stingers and other missiles, which they were at first afraid of but quickly learned to point at a target and squeeze the trigger. Soviet pilots were forced to do zigzag patterns approaching Kabul which suggested to some journalists they had been drinking Stolichnaya. The truth was that modern technology had made imperialist wars so obsolete there were no longer any underdogs and you could wish with a good conscience the Afghan "freedom fighters" dropped dead, which you surely would if you fell into their clutches.

      If the Taliban, who stoned women to death if they didn't wear a tent when going to the market, could end up controlling a country, the bright, shining example of heroic Vietnam was defunct as far as I was concerned. Reagan and the people who were chosen to lead the conservative revolution, demonstrated that conventional warfare by a big power was not enough to subdue even a nation so backward it had not reached the handkerchief phase and was still stuck in the blow-the-mucus-out-from-one-nostril phase, eons away from paper-tissue culture. And of course the American vicarious victory in Afghanistan, led to the revisionist thesis that the United States had not lost the Vietnam War: it had simply not won it. Vietnam War movies--initially like agonized re-examinations of history but later dime-a-dozen masturbatory fantasies about super-human heroes--proved to gullible viewers that if a secret division called Rambo had been called in events would have taken another turn.

      Reagan was a firm believer in this idea. He turned out to be but a modest conservative revolutionary. He did not dismantle the welfare state and after years of calling the reds devils he ended up buddies with CPSU secretary general Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who finally understood that the USSR was not sane and chose a course of gradual reform. Unfortunately, Gorbachev's party was crashed by a group of nostalgic wallflowers and Boris Yeltsin swept them all away in a drunken rage. Russia fell into the hands of oligarchs and the United States became so yuppified the word yuppy came to mean mainstream, in which many included multi-billionaires but excluded Blacks and Hispanics. Jews and Asians were considered IQ, hence untouchables, although Asians had the problem of their all too recognizable features, which the Jews liked. In brief, I was not looking in those times at anything I liked. What I saw inside and outside myself appeared to merit nothing less than the name of neurosis, whatever this was, and it really wasn't the right word, which, as I figured in due time, was an imposture, certainly nothing in comparison with dementia, of which there are two or maybe three flavours: praecox, senile, and outright brain damage.

China, whose idea of Third World was that it had a right to at least one third of the world, invaded Vietnam and fought a war the result of which was that each side suffered a lot of casualties

The signals coming from the third world were on the whole depressing. Vietnam had lost a lot of prestige by encouraging the exodus of the boat people, a mass of humanity who were prepared to face misery, deprivation, hunger, sharks, and pirates rather than live under communism. The communists who came to power in Cambodia practiced self-genocide, which made Hitler seem like a paragon of rational consistency. The Vietnamese, acting in self-defense, put an end to the killing fields, upon which China, whose idea of third world was that it had a right to at least one third of the world, invaded Vietnam and fought a war the result of which was that each side suffered a lot of casualties. Nothing else is known or claimed.

      Well-meaning and trusting people like me had believed that when a dirt-poor country went communist, or at least pro-Soviet, it disappeared from the news while its rulers went about transforming it through modernization--for instance: suppressing female circumcision, which is a deep and painful cut in the vagina--and planned economic development. To the surprise of the well-intentioned and naive, showcases such as Ethiopia and Mozambique suddenly began to disintegrate. The obvious question was: how can these socialist countries be modernizing and developing if their rulers can't even control their territories? Or more pertinently: was it gullibility or idiocy? And who were the "well-meaning" or the "well-intentioned"? This even opened the possibility of: maybe it was only me? And that would have really meant trouble.

      As to Cuba, I tried not to think about it and when I finally did it was to realize that despite Castro's long speeches and the example of Che Guevara, it was still a very poor country, still dependent on sugar exports, with a very low infant mortality rate, according to official statistics. I learned on visits there that abortion had become an adolescent rite of passage and marriage meant going steady.

      I have only a couple of things to add to close the chapter on my political career. Despite its ignominious end, some one did an anthology of Blow-out in which half the articles were mine. The book sold well but I got nothing out of it save the opprobrium provoked by the book's title, which was a paraphrase of "Something is rotten in Denmark", but more explicit about the source of the smell.

      I spent forty-five days in prison before they verified my claim that I was not a Costaguanan and my expulsion to The Republic was decreed and carried out, which occurred not because of but in spite of Lakas. He had taken my case as if I were guilty of something and he was wrongfooted when the expulsion order came, which is why he tried to get back at me by insisting with a mournful face that the news was false. As this meant I had to spend the rest of my life in a filthy military jail where I had to scrape off the crap every time I went to the toilet, I panicked until my fat sadistic lawyer relented and told me the truth.

      After I was expelled, Costaguana's economy started crumbling, even before I could extricate what little I had. Now, I had written that the country was beset by corruption and inefficiency--government employment direct and indirect occupied about a third of the population--so how could I have been such a fool that I did not foresee its collapse? I have no clear-cut answer to that one, except that I was indeed a fool, and self-love precludes me from living with that idea. Maybe I didn't think the country was so hopeless. Or I was so committed to my selfless theoretical social causes I didn't bother to take notice of reality. Or finally maybe I didn't believe in anything and I was in it for the sake of the experience, which was about all I obtained from all the tomfoolery I engaged in with Sundance and the other political jokers I palled around with. Be that as it may, my final theory about the country was that it had it easy for some fifty years of oil riches--the shantytowns fooled me until I realized Costaguanans actually like living in shacks--and that it was going to take twice that much for the country to recover. This would take it close to the 22nd century, by which time Costaguanans, who are mixed bunch, would all look like Asians and would have gotten over their hang ups.

      In my dippings into the world, which in my conflictive vision of my relations to it were like razzias and skirmishes and even battles, I was definitely getting trounced. But it could not be said that all my straining had gone to waste because I had achieved some bold strokes. These however were insufficient to allow me to claim much for my strategies, except one thing, and that not unimportant, which was that as my wars had not concluded all options and possibilities were still open.

The ex-Apocrisiary had become a classic case of Mithridatism and he could no more have killed himself with barbiturates than a gopher could die from gorging on beets

I had neither intended nor wanted to go back to The Republic, which was much like Costaguana, where I was fed up as well as not wanted. I tried getting asylum in Paris, but the French were not buying it, for they had to contend with radicals of their own and they weren't taking my word, as against my deeds, that I wasn't really a commie. The bottom-line was I had no choice in my expulsion destination because The Republic was willing to take me back and that was where I belonged.

      When I got there, I didn't even have a cot to sleep on. My exwife was happily married and knew enough not to come within a mile of me. There were a few writers and journalists I hadn't quarreled with or offended and they were willing to put me up for a time. What it came down to finally was that either I had to start from absolute zero, and I didn't envision things being any easier for me since the first time I tried that, or I had to go back to the Apocrisiary.

      I wasn't sure how things stood with us, because I had gone my own way a long time ago and he, not being an ace at communicating with me, had made no effort to get in touch. Some one had told me he had been following my career, but this was like the time I was informed that Piney the newspaper owner had a very high opinion of me, which I might have wanted to believe but was not about to, even if I had given a damn. With my father, I did care, but I had no illusions. Even if I had proof positive of his concern, knowing mostly the sceptical and sarcastic side of his personality, I wouldn't have put much stock on it. But now I really needed help and I was willing to give his reported fatherly concern the benefit of the doubt. I had to know more about his life and for this I knew the perfect contact. This was Alberich Potsherd, a tubby politician with whom he was intimate from way back and from whose chit-chat I reconstructed something of what my father's life had been like during the years I spent in Costaguana.

      Potsherd was a total extrovert with some talent. He was a good resolute speaker and a prolific satirist and he was completely unprincipled, which gave him an edge over most every one. He was in sum a politician nonpareil. He also had disadvantages. He was too tubby and too disperse to be a leader, so he attached himself to more outstanding personalities without seeming to be their toady, which he was. His attachments induced in himself hatreds of other outstanding personalities and he happily assumed the role of hatchet-man, at first on behalf of his benefactors, but gradually with an irrational and extreme personal passion. Transposing to my recent experiences, Potsherd's peeves were as if Arry the Pomeranian had turned on Whip'em-Good and was gnawing at his lapels, which of course reminded me of Duck, my unfortunate first dog.

      I did not like Potsherd, who always smoked Havanas and tried to be patronizing by giving me some of his expensive-type cigars--which I didn't mind because I liked them and I thought he was as shallow as a frying pan--but I thought he would be a reliable source on the Apocrisiary. When I contacted him, Potsherd was more than willing to put me up to date. Although I already knew much of the information, I let him speak freely(a veritable feat of extreme self control) so as to pick out the parts I didn't know, mostly concentrated at the end.

      Due to the requirements of his diplomatic duties, the Apocrisiary could not check the figures at the newspaper on a regular basis and he naturally concluded he was being robbed by his partner, with whom he proceeded to share out their "media holdings", which were the daily and a weekly that combined political gossip and so-called news from the world of entertainment, very much the sort of fare for nitwits that Gina specialized in. The Apocrisiary had chosen the magazine over the newspaper because it was easier to control and its gossip was much appreciated by politicians, with due compensation, of course, for the daily was profitable and the magazine was not.

      He had always been more interested in politics than in anything else. Diplomacy for him was like a prize he believed he had merited and he took it seriously only in so far as it kept him abreast of the political world. This cavalier attitude had its disadvantages and his postings were not devoid of controversy. He had made enemies and after Brussels he was the victim of a politically motivated and completely unjustified defamation campaign. I had learnt about this and I had sent him a message of support. He had fought back not with a lawsuit, as I had advised him, but with denunciations of his denunciators, which turned into an I-did-not-you-did-too sort of thing with lots of invective thrown in, a patently circular and unproductive strategy.

      Potsherd expressed his belief that my father was too self-centered in his approach to politics, which of course he was, being extremely vain, but this sounded to me like a kettle mooning a pot. The only difference I saw between them was that the Apocrisiary was up front about his personal animosities and Potsherd cloaked them in party politics which had a vaguely ideological sound to it. So it happened that the Apocrisiary unexpectedly found himself in the uncomfortable situation of having a president of The Republic he had opposed publicly with some vehemence for purely personal reasons. There were ways of getting around such problems--with a telegram or a message through a third party, for instance, that said in essence: "Boy, was I ever wrong about you being a bonehead and only good as a nutcracker!"--but he chose a dignified consistency attitude and quit. Thus far Potsherd could enlighten me and he suggested I contact Tessie, my father's secretary, which I did very quickly because I was running out of friends with guest rooms and I was very touchy about such a dependence.

My father had programmed his life so as to have a hammer hit him on the head every time he went for his crotch, which he couldn't avoid doing periodically

Tessie was a very attractive woman: she had dark Egyptian looks, especially her profile, and she had long wavy black hair. She was small in the breasts department but she had an awe-inspiring derrière which naturally went with long well-formed legs (otherwise she would have looked like two sticks carrying very large buns). Eventually, she would correct the part of her outline that did not live up to her exuberant good looks. Eventually also, many things would happen between her and me. Although I did not know it, when I met her I was staring at "Gradus", the last part of these memoirs. Had I known it, perhaps I would have behaved differently later, for who wouldn't want to change feeling like a viper and crawling along a floor for something more like normal? And then again, who can know anything of the future? Which even if it were known--for after all we do know things that will always be around, like people being born and dying--what can we do to change anything? I call this the ontological chain and it is properly part of my redemption phase, although it won't take up too much space there and a sharp discerning reader will have gathered from what I've said the essence of my belief. Not every one agrees with determinism and I don't think I gained points with Scanlon, who was a determinist, when I met him in London, near Bentham's mummy--for some reason he made a point of showing it to me--and I told him, who had written two thick volumes on the issue, that I considered determinism a "given". He just said: "A given, huh?" But he got back at me, as have others, by not answering my e-mails. There is always the chance I will not answer theirs if the time comes.

      Anyhow, Tessie was informative about things Potsherd did not know and her information filled the gaps in his account. After exchanging his share of the newspaper for the magazine, the Apocrisiary had taken stock of his capital and made some important decisions. He put money into a New York City bank account for investment management. He had constructed a small luxury apartment building on a hillside with a high, wide view, which he financed mostly with his own funds so as to have no debts with banks. He kept the PH for himself and two other apartments for rent. He bought a print company to produce the magazine. And he acquired premises in the top floor of an office tower from which he could survey the world as if it were an anthill. His political clout was at its strongest during his diplomatic career, when he also obtained a seat in Congress, but it wasn't diminished by much with his resignation as Apocrisiary. He had the magazine with its disproportionate influence in the political world--stuff like "Congressman x said that Senator y was badly in need of an overhaul" did not seem to me of mind-boggling transcendence--and he still had the legal immunities and perks of a Representative of the People.

      The Apocrisiary had, as any one could deduce from the information I have remitted about him, a neurotic compulsion to control. He had problems sleeping, which became obsessive, and he tried to force himself to fall asleep, which was like setting off a very loud alarm system every time he put his head on a pillow. Just the effort of thinking you had to go to sleep right away or you would not get a good rest would be enough to keep anybody awake all night, especially if this went with a naturally frayable nervous system, which he also possessed. Not being able to control sleep directly, he chose the next best thing, which were barbiturates. Actually, he had begun with Belladonna, Passiflora, and other natural tranquility-inducers, but they were like feeding chicken wings to a famished lion. Then he fell into the hands of Dr Lopez Ibor, a follower of Marañon--the one, you'll remember, who claimed Dante was a masturbator--and he prescribed the barbiturates, which my father took with abandon. He became a classic case of Mithridatism and he could no more have killed himself with barbiturates than a fish could have drowned in a swimming pool or a gopher could die from gorging on beets.

      There were other failures of control in his life which may have induced the problem with sleep, but all I will say about his blindspots is that he was both brilliant and obtuse, the latter perhaps because he did not stop to reflect, or because he thought too much about himself by himself, a failing I possibly inherited. His personal problems might have had something to do with his upbringing or with the society he was brought up in or with his exposure, given his background, to Europe, or a combination of all these with his difficult temperament thrown in, but I do not know. Given my own quirks, he could also have been borderline or near psychotic, which would go the distance to explain certain crucial facts about his life. Lopez Ibor might have written the prescriptions but I am sure the hand that guided his hand was the Apocrisiary's. At the time of my return to The Republic, barbiturates were not helping much and he was suffering from attention deficit from both the pills and the insomnia.

      Apart from the insomnia problem, all in all he was as independent from the vagaries of fortune as a man can be. There were complications from his principled stand on not being monogamous, which was a curious imperative in various ways. It wasn't an irresistible penchant for womanizing because he was not the seducer type--he was vain as hell about his good looks, but for a true Lothario this is secondary to his ends--and even though my mother knew the subtleties of the fine art of nagging, he was resigned to being married to her to his dying day. Another reason he was not a true Don Juan was that he didn't care how he had other women as long as he had them, even to paying for them, which was mostly what he was doing when I returned to The Republic. So then, here was a man who did not believe in marriage but did not want to be non-married, who bragged of the women he was laying but had to pay for them through his nose, and who was married to an unaccomodating woman he was incapable of leaving. He had programmed his life so as to have a hammer hit him on the head every time he went for his crotch, which he couldn't avoid doing periodically.

      As to my mother, her love had gone through the extremely unutterable gratitude phase after my father married her during her pregnancy with me (which did not prevent her later from siccing on him the cataphracts she summoned to ward off the presumptuous Tanagra), then it went through the relief-and-gratitude phase after the then Managing Editor had asked for a divorce and backed off when she did like a martyr (which might possibly have fooled him into believing he had her tamed), but then it began changing from overwhelming, cloying gratitude to ferociously feline bursts of defiance (like chewing off one of the lion tamer's fingers), on to a continuous propensity to roar (when she realized he was, sort of speaking, a paper lion tamer), and finally to the phase in which the lion had its tamer running around the cage and trying to climb up the bars. In other words, my mother had become the bully that inhabits every victim's soul. But my father could afford to take this emotional beating because he could afford everything else he wanted.

      Tessie acted as go-between for us and my father let me know I had an office at my disposal at the magazine. I moved in and he passed by and said: "Hello", or some mumbly equivalent, because I don't remember he ever used that word, or "Thank you", or "Good bye", which may be why I overuse them, as well as "How are you?", which is pretty useless as expressions go. Although I was assigned a good salary at the magazine, my job was specifically and exclusively to edit my father's articles, which I did to the best of my ability. Those articles, which he dictated very quickly to Tessie, were a reliable indication of the state of his intellect, in turn a reflection of his general state of mind, on which I had no other clues. His affairs he ran very much by himself and I was never invited for consultations. I had plenty of time in which to do anything I wanted.

      As I was somewhat disoriented, the natural outlet was to go on writing as I had always done. I first tried my hand at reliving my recent experiences and concentrating on politics and history, but my heart was not in it. If I did not give a damn about The Republic, I wasn't about to start caring about what had happened in Costaguana. I was still keeping my diary--it was about the only thing I possessed through the years--but I had nearly forgotten Lighting Bolt Night. I say "nearly" because I did attempt an outline of a psychological theory, but when I saw what I had done I shredded it, mainly because it was just warmed over Freudianism and the same questions were still dangling in my mind without proper answers. The questions had probably become more complex, for, if my father's conduct was inexplicable, mine was like a black hole sucking in all kinds of theories and facts and shedding nothing in return. This was made possible by my no longer having to worry about survival and also through my persistent heavy drinking, which was nothing like my alcoholic period but still sufficient to erase any lingering daytime preoccupations. According to some calculations, black holes leak and eventually will dissolve, but this requires the existence of certain particles of planetary dimensions no one has ever detected. It was certainly possible I could be leaking and eventually would dissolve and no one would notice.

In Gonzy's novel, the hero at the end wet his pants, which gave his work a perfect social realist touch

As I had never cultivated literary friendships and cliques, I had a literary reputation the size of a microbe, but I considered my previous creative efforts to be of genius quality. My exaggerated opinion of myself was partly based on comparisons. The managing editor-novelist Sylvan who had treated so disparagingly my request for a job was still busily promoting his candidacy to the Nobel Prize. Among his dubious credentials were that he knew Neruda and Garcia Marquez. My father once had Garcia Marquez working for him at the magazine and had fired him because he didn't like the way he wrote. This may sound comic, but it happens to be a point on which he and I were totally agreed, and need I mention such immortals as Prudhomme, Mommsen, Bjornson, Mistral, Echegaray, Sienkiwiecz, Carducci, Eucken, Lagerlof, Hayse, etc.? I mean, to read Solzhenitsyn you have to screw your courage to the screwing place, and hammer it down hard to make sure it stays there. If you want a history of literary ephemerals, just glance over the list of Nobel Prizes for literature, which appear to be awarded on the basis of criteria that have done the gamut over the years from let's-stick-to-the-best-sellers to let's-look-for-a-real-nobody, at which extreme it is usually the poets who benefit. But Sylvan didn't fit any criteria, except being pretentious, and he wasn't a poet. He had recently made a big "hit" with a novel about a deserted village, which was very interesting if the description of empty houses with voiceovers happens to be your thing. But the literary sensation at the time of my return to The Republic was Tone Gonzy, an author of the peasants-with-ribs-sticking-out school of short-story writing who made the switch to novel-writing with a much acclaimed work about an intellectual, presumably himself, who is on some kind of dangerous subversive mission in a crowded bus and tries to keep his morale up by doing mental imitations of Garcia Marquez. The ending comes when he wets his pants, which gave the novel a perfect social realist touch. In a great show of international solidarity, Gonzy had sent a telegram of support to the Costaguanan waffler-man.

      I was not over-enthused by the local literary scene, but I undertook the composition of a novel perfectly aware of the obstacles I would have to overcome to get it accepted by a publisher. For this work I harked to my jailbird experience. The novel was about a group of prisoners for vaguely political reasons whose cases never came to trial. The shades of Kafka were only superficially pursuing me. The band of prisoners was riven by opinions as to what to do about their condition. Most wanted to escape. Some were in favour of taking over the prison. Others didn't care either way. Time was standing still. The plot was set up in such a way that what the prisoners could know about their gaolers and their jail were inferences from their immediate surroundings and from hints about the world beyond the walls. The prison itself was an old stone fortress in the middle of a desert near the sea. The prison yard was only a part of the fortress.

      One of the prisoners, the oldest of the lot, Bizarro, was actively against escape plans and he was considered by the others to be crazy. The ringleader of the escape plotters, Guzman, treated him with special disdain, because he had found out Bizarro had once been an informer. Finally, a group managed to escape. They were captured, tortured, and sent back to the yard, after which the now chastened ringleader and the former snitch became allies and the prisoners, once rid of some bad apples, began acting cohesively in a systematic effort to learn about their world and to gain control of the fortress. Time became real. In fact, the novel was titled Doing Time, a stupendous pun in my highly prejudiced opinion. Its message was that mankind, trapped in a set of concentric circles it would never break through, never ceases trying. To show that the problem started on the individual level with failures of communication, I invented a numbers game which could be played without need of objects or markings, it was that simple, but it always ended in quarrels and fights. The rules of the game were explained in an appendix to the novel's text. Boy, I thought to myself, am I ever clever! However, I had to admit the novel was dry as dust. My tries at comedy were few, far between, and of the Samuel Beckett stumbling-clowns variety. They didn't make even me break a smile.

      You might be wondering what had happened to Mr. Billy Goat who never saw a brothel he didn't enter and who couldn't have his fill of supercharged Gina. You might even think he was a rabbit, who fuck repeatedly but after very short orgasms fall flat on their back and if you isolate them all they do is peel their front teeth and sniff. Well, during my political period I slept around whenever I had the opportunity. Blow-out also provided chances. I even got letters from women I had met and bedded once and I did not even feel obligated to respond. This was most inconsiderate, I know, but it is also vaguely instructive when considered together with my unanswered e-mails, for it says something about the ways of the world, where you often get the shaft, which makes you very indignant until you consider that getting it and giving it cancel each other out and that to expect a better average is very hubristic and like crying out for the "gods" to gang up on you. Unfortunately, this lesson is something individuals often, possibly always, have to learn on their own, and even when they think they have it pat, they still keep making the wrong calculations, like the characters in my novel, and believe they are getting it more often than they are giving it. All these observations are, of course, all things being equal, because what to me might be giving or getting the shaft, for another, depending on his station, might be either like brushing off dandruff or like being subjected to an involuntary rectal probe.

When Johnny Lepanto went to a party he was always followed by his personal butler with a tray and a bottle of his favorite Cabernet

Getting back to my sexual life, in The Republic I was at first very continent, which is understandable considering I was somewhat deficient on the enthusiasm scale. Then I met Gala, the prettiest Tanagra I ever saw, and she and I were attracted to each other. Even though we never married I have always considered her as my third wife. She was impressed by my knowledge of literature and I was impressed by the way she was impressed. This was the beginning of a beautiful if a little lop-sided romance, although I might be letting my vanity run away with me. She seemed to be inordinately fond of me and I went to her whenever I needed to love and be loved, but I did not act on her oblique suggestions for a more lasting union and I do not remember that she went around shedding tears over that.

      Gala was a good friend of the poet Johnny Lepanto and when he was named head of an important publishing house he took her with him. Lepanto looked every bit the high-class man of sensibility. He was into many things, among them changing wives and importing wines. When he went to a party he was always followed by his personal butler with a tray and a bottle of his favorite Cabernet. I found and still find this quite impressive. Lepanto also had a literary magazine and he published a couple of articles by me in some of which he objected to my homely expressions, like saying that Thomas Mann "blew Bronx cheers (bucal farts)" at bourgeois pieties.

If the reader should be thinking that my Gala affair had anything to do with my novel, it would be not so much a mistake as an inaccuracy. I knew she would have it published if I but gave her the slightest pretext, so I sent the manuscript to a literary contest without any particular expectations and to my surprise it won a "mention". This wasn't even contemplated in the contest's rules and, considering that most juries in The Republic were rigged, it was particularly meritworthy. Gala had her excuse to get Lepanto to publish my work and he not only did but also wrote that it was a signal achievement and the beginning of a new epoch in novel writing, which I thought was an exaggeration and which he apparently did not mean because he later published a history of the novel and never even mentioned me. I didn't mind either way because as I said I considered I was too solemn about my imaginary fortress-prison and its patently symbolical characters and I wasn't in love with my own production and the only reason I wanted it published was because I had written it.

      It did serve to encourage me to go on with my public writing, as opposed to the diary, which was like my Philoctetes' wound and my one unbreakable link with the basic purpose of my life: knowing what it was that made me muddle on in the middle of so much muck. I didn't even suspect how thick and sticky it was going to get. But perhaps I complain too much in these memoirs and I might be beginning to sound like Kafka and his agonizing need for a paternal pat on the head. In any event, I didn't have it half as bad as my father was going to start having it. The trouble again was his passion for control, for if he could not control his sleep or his women or his business partners or even me, his plans to build a fortress with a moat for himself--and of course my mother who would not get off his case for long--were bound to hit unexpected faults and slips. And this was what literally began to erode his apparently well-considered plans.

      The first sign of trouble was that the slope on which he built his exclusive apartment building was leached by a broken sewage pipe and a slice came off like a dark-brown, malodorous avalanche. Technically, this was the second serious problem with that building. The first had been that the architectural-engineering team he had chosen against better advice had misplaced the entire building in relation to the plot area requiring the construction of an expensive access ramp. The foundations of the building, which, because of the terrain, could have supported the Eiffel Tower, were costly, but even more costly were the works required to shore up the gash where the ground had slipped down. I was present when my father, who should have taken his construction team to a criminal court, tried to place the blame on the owner of the house on which all the stinking sewage-impregnated soil had fallen. That took some doing and it put on display some of the traits with which he had made good in life. It also showed that maybe he wasn't controlling things in quite the way he wanted.

      Then, the printing plant he had bought for the magazine went bust. He refused to buy a new press, which he could easily have done with bank credit, but he was dead set against borrowing, as if he had never overcome the old prejudice that the best place for money was inside a mattress. In the meantime, the quality of the old press deteriorated causing the loss of the clients he needed to cover costs and subsidize the magazine, which was not much of a profit-maker. Even this could have been salvaged, but unluckily--which makes me think of an invisible hand, a hairy one with wrinkles and long black nails--the terrain at the plant also started subsiding, making it look like a Krazy Kat cartoon and scaring the workers who feared they could be swallowed by the earth at any moment, a nightmare even Marxists litterateurs couldn't have imagined. This lead to the unsustainability of the magazine without subsidies he couldn't afford and he was forced to sell it, at a surprisingly good price considering its fundamental worthlessness. Without his ability to hawk gossip, he felt (mistakenly in my opinion) that he was done for politically. 

I discovered that my father's money not only had been misinvested but that if a konobo had taken the stock listings and pointed at them at random he would had done better than the bank's analysts

The personal decay was palpable. He was used to being sought out by politicians and that was no longer going to be the case, which didn't rule out that he could do the seeking, like asking and surely getting another embassy, but this role he was not going to assume. In lieu of the magazine he would pay for entire pages in dailies and publish articles or speeches, until the wiseacre cartoonist Zapote mocked him and my father put a stop to the only means he had for publicly expressing his views.

      Now, I have been scathing in the past about the former Apocrisiary, but this did not mean I believed every one had the right to take liberties with him, so I think my peeve at Zapote should seem comprehensible and prove that I was not entirely devoid of filial piety. The author of the barb was considered very funny in some circles--mainly of other unsuccessful comedians like him--but he was so total a mediocrity that a drawing he gave to a dentist in New York ended up under a pile of uncollectibles. I saw it because I used the same dentist and he dug it up for me and we had a laugh because we couldn't make heads of tails of it, although out of reticence neither of us said out loud why we were laughing.

      Zapote also had pretensions as a serious artist, but he was very myopic and when he tried his hand at bullfighting scenes the results looked like a flea circus. Others compared this work to genre scenes from a termite mound. Another artistic ploy he used was painting distortions of photographs from the time of the Mexican Revolution, for which he didn't have to squint, but here the lack of originality told and he became the greatest collector in the world of his own paintings. I mean, look at it this way: photography captures the instant and painting is about the non-ephemeral and Zapote was trying to make non-ephemeral the utterly instantaneous, which was in the nature of a terminal degradation of two art genres.

      My father had still sufficient money to survive comfortably even if he did no investing whatever, which he could do if he wanted to, although by then admittedly he must have been scared with the run of bad luck he was having. He was writing his memoirs to while away the hours and I was getting all his copy. It tended to become more and more incoherent and sometimes I inconsiderately bitched about it to Tessie. Then one day out of the blue, he asked me to look into his dollar accounts.

      Now, you must bear in mind that I hadn't in my life done any investing apart from my years as a journalist and what I managed then were peanuts. My mind was bent towards my own writing and towards my father's own variable and confused outpourings. He was at that stage under the influence of a manic-depressive curve in the course of which brooding apathy, which precluded writing of any sort, would give way to bursts of pathetically nervous activity in which he did a lot of dictating of sentences with the barest explicitly logical sequencing. I knew he had arguments in his brain and I tried to get to them, which took a lot of work. As he never complained of my editing I must have been doing a good job. This might have prompted his unwise decision to get me to attend to his business, something he never in his life had ever even adumbrated.

      I went to the bank in New York City, the Hunt Gotham Super World Bank Corp. Inc. and Ltd., and I discovered that not only had his money been misinvested but that if a konobo had taken the stock listings and pointed at them at random he would had done better than the bank's analysts. I tried to speak to his "investment advisor" but they told me she was on maternity leave. His capital had been whittled down to a quarter of what it had been. Even I could tell the situation was hopeless because it wasn't even possible to hang tough and wait for a recovery when much of the portfolio was made up of shares in companies that had gone belly up. I liquidated everything and let the money stay in an account until I decided what to do next. I reported to my father and he just nodded as if I had done an excellent job. But to be quite honest I had no idea where to go from there. I knew he was relying on me but I also believed this was only a provisional arrangement in which all I had to do was tidy up a mess.

I didn't know that a Swiss bank canvassing for funds would have been like a gymnast with a shrivelled leg or a dazzling diver who couldn't swim

For help I turned to the Facchinos and specifically to Isaac the soccer ace who delighted his fellow students at The Mount with his antics. I knew he had invested some money for a friend and even though it didn't make a huge profit it hadn't turned out badly in what was then a tight real estate market. Isaac put me in touch with another brother, not Jaime, the one I had called an onion-eater, but a third, Jacob, with whom he worked hand in glove. Jacob came to my office with a guy who looked either as if he was suffering from indigestion or had a very bad conscience. Maybe too he wanted to seem extremely Swiss, which meant looking very serious, as if expecting at any moment an order for a currency conversion and being prepared to be very cross if it wasn't forthcoming. He represented a Swiss bank and was offering extraordinary returns on long-term deposits. Coming from my friend Facchino and involving a Swiss bank, what better placement could I find for my father's money while it was determined what to do with it in the long run? But as they say, over the long run we are all dead. I didn't know that a Swiss bank canvassing for funds must have had its goose cooked. It would have been like a gymnast with a shrivelled leg or a dazzling diver who couldn't swim. Within a month the bank had folded and the accountants had taken over and the best hope they were offering was to return 30% of the money over maybe half a decade.

      I tried to keep this information from my father, but his faculties hadn't deteriorated that much. He intercepted some correspondence from the failed bank and when he next saw me he just looked discouraged, as if he thought he had been a cretin to trust me, which was true enough, although as I say I had this responsibility thrust upon me and I wasn't exactly what you might describe as conversant with financial affairs. It could even be argued that I wasn't even conversant with reality, for all I had seen and gone through in Costaguana, not to mention events in the wider world, could easily have engendered doubts as to whether these things were real as opposed to happening in my brain. Assuming they were real, my father's error lay in believing that, since I did such a good job of editing his memoirs, I was fully capable of leading a normal real-world life, a gross miscalculation.

      My father was also having big problems with his erections. My mother was not giving him much rest and he had dispatched his last mistress by turning over to her the property of a motor boat he had bought so that she could go water skiing. He had given many warnings before but nobody was paying attention. I was, at a respectful distance, so it did not suprise me exceedingly when I was called and told he had walked into a clinic, pulled out a snub-nosed 38, put it in his mouth, and squeezed the trigger. Every one but the clinic's administrators, who thought he could at least have rented a room, said he had been brave and relatively circumspect. There's the remote possibily--absurd, of course--that,  being as attached to life as any one, he might have thought the quacks at the clinic could revive him and that his gesture was a really big howl for the world to notice the misery he was going through.

      At the funeral home, witnesses were touched by the way I stroked my dead father's cheek. I don't mean to imply I didn't do it from true feeling, but I was also thinking about how they had managed to plug the hole at the back of his head. His funeral was attended by the doers and shakers. I too was feeling dead. Only I was alive and my father wasn't.

      During the homily, the priest tried to excuse his rash deed. That made me indignant. Suicide, I told a reporter who approached me, was in the scheme of things. Why had he done it? I tried to answer and thought I was being very eloquent when I explained how circumstances could become so complex and so fraught that they left no other way out. What the reporter wanted to hear was that my father had cancer. At the end of my explanation, he looked dumbfounded, not sure whether I hadn't been blowing smoke up his ass.

      The police had impounded the suicide note and I didn't even bother getting it back. The only thing I recovered from the scene of his death were his blood-spattered glasses. I kept them a long time and might have even felt sorry for him the last time I took them out of the desk and destroyed them.

      For a long time also, I did not think about his death. Then I thought it was my fault. This was just before I began my ascent to "Gradus". Along the way I still believed I was the guilty party, but in an indirect, even subliminal sense. The best illustration I found for this is the story of how Muhammed Tuhgluq had murdered his own father, Ghiyas-ud-Din Tughluq, upon the latter's victorious return from a military campaign, by constructing a celebratory temple which was designed to collapse when the incumbent Delhi Sultan stepped inside. As the building was made of stone, this is surely an apocryphal account by a survivor of the latter part of sultan Tughluq's reign, when he never went anywhere without his executioner.

      I have finally come to two conclusions on my father's suicide: that it was bound to happen and that the responsibility was his and his alone. My father's control obsession might have possibly begun with the frustration of his imperial career, which had culminated in his Magister rank. After the Kingdom was abolished he momentarily lost control and had to struggle hard until he became Managing Editor and began to control things again. But he couldn't be sure. He acted as if he could. He did not bend his knee. His ethical preference for dogs over humans might have been an affectation or it might have been sincere. There is no doubt that he wanted to place himself beyond the reach of misfortune and when he saw that his efforts were in vain he put an end to his life. He outdid Sinatra by far for he really did it his way, and no question about it.

      Given my inevitable gravitation towards second thoughts, however, these exculpatory arguments are inevitably followed by the certainty that my father's death was my doing in revenge for all the many unprovoked attacks accompanied by even more gratuitous humiliations he inflicted on me. How blameworthy he was is another issue, and here we would be skirting the thorny ascription problem in a determined universe, so we shall let that pass for now.

      I have already told how my mother, not long after my father's death, tried to face death with dignity until some quacks broke her courage by subjecting her to their abusive, so-called life-sustaining treatments, which they use only when they think it is worth their while. Well, with me they didn't get away with it, because I left their bills unpaid and even dared them to sue.

      She must have felt much more guilty than I did, because it was to her that he had mentioned his suicidal intentions and she had once told him in exasperation to do it. I knew of an apprentice psychiatrist who had snapped at a suicidal patient to stop whining, which he took as a challenge and went and killed himself. The quack got over that--although in future he was very careful about challenging his patients--but with my mother it was different. She lingered on very sadly and took her admiration-and-gratitude stance to such lengths I felt like a slimy worm whenever she looked at me. If I made the slightest claim for myself, she found the means to quash it, usually with a look so sceptical I knew there was absolutely no use arguing. I went on with my father's memoirs and managed to patch up a succint version--stronger on dates and facts than on justifications or interpretations--which I had published on the anniversary of his death. Her reward for my efforts was that I hadn't said he was perfect. I felt deeply her death, especially as I knew how she had fooled herself through life, but I was also relieved at not having to feel like squirming bait.

      Having said all this, I must grant I have been beating around the bush because what I really derived from these tragic events was the strong suspicion that I had a chronic and possibly incurable love-deficiency, expressed in my Jew-of-Malta, the-wench-is-dead complex about emotions. Furthermore, I had to admit that my parents might have been justified in their negative attitude towards my first marriage--I myself had shed any romantic illusions about my marriage to Gina--into which I could well have entered without real deep love. I knew I had married in part to escape my mother's banshee wailing, but I was reluctant to concede my cynicism might have been greater than I thought. This possibility was now more in the nature of a likelihood. I was also having the suspicion that my possible lunacy was not just a rhetorical expression--like "I cannot believe I acted this crazy"--but a palpable form of paranoia engendered by extreme feelings of guilt.

A London bank started with the letter-of-recommendation routine until I showed them a check for $500,000 and they sent me to the Bible-swearing department where I crossed my heart and said my money was drug-free

What occurred after my father's death, was possibly the greatest mistake in my life. I took over the office he left, which without the magazine was an empty shell. Many people thought I had inherited a huge fortune and had become a millionaire overnight, but this was very wide of the mark. Essentially, what happened was I got stuck in another dipping, this time in the role of businessman, because there was some money there to manage, just enough to allow me to live high on the hog but not enough to feel securely rich. The foundations were not there. They could have existed if my father had been more fond of money than of his illusory pretense at aseity. Nevertheless, I had never seen so much money in my life and I was swept off my feet.

      The only wise decision I made was to take a half million dollars to London, where they started with the letter-of-recommendation routine until I showed them my check and they sent me to the Bible-swearing department where I crossed my heart and said my money was drug-free. This money would come in handy later, but it would also be the instrument of my final stumble and the beginning of my new life. Had I done the same with the entire inheritance, I might have saved myself a lot of sweat, but then I wouldn't be writing these confessions, would I?

      In my new station in life, I kept the few employees my father had retained. Trying to look self-important, which is how I imagined a man of affairs, I told them we would "carry on". I did not know what exactly it was we were going to "carry on", although I did have a vague feeling of responsibility towards these people, especially Tessie, whose flirtatious manner and shapely buttocks had been making inroads with me, and I would have liked to reciprocate them. It was early times for that.

      A good lawyer, Simon Arrak, one of Tessie's former lovers (as I discovered later), did a competent job with the death duties. When I managed to get the papers together I saw there was a blood-letting which I easily traced to the liberal subsidies my father had assigned his former paramours. I quickly staunched that, especially after I discovered that a woman who had a child she claimed was his had really had it with a door-to-door salesman. Don't ask me how I learned this, but I did. I presumed it was my father's vanity which made him fall for such a trick.

      After these and other preliminaries, I consolidated all the monies into an investment fund and was literally ready for business. I will do the details further on, but a fair summary of my business career was that, despite the pruning, I couldn't get rid of all the obligations and while things did improve and for while there were signs of a turnaround, in the end decline set in again.

      Not long after my father's death, through sheer carelessness, I seemed about to go under entirely, but I blustered my way through and managed to undo my mistake, which was that an unscrupulous financier named Planes had conned me with a false document. My card was that I could bring a criminal suit, which I could not afford for long, but Planes was in a similar situation and he blinked first. It was like a tense poker game in which all the stakes were on the table and the two players, after fiddling with their cards and looking intently at each other, decided to call it quits. The experience unnerved me. By then I had bought a Jaguar and was smoking the same brand of cigars as Potsherd and I was, to put it briefly, not thinking straight.

      Even worse than that, despite my posturing I was only dipping into business. I wasn't even as committed as in my previous dippings. I had been the journalist and the pilot and the radical politician, and only these, during the times I had assumed those parts. But as a businessman I was sharing my time with activities that had nothing to do with business. I bought myself another plane--a smaller Piper than the previous one I had--which I used strictly for pleasure. I was also doing a lot of writing of the self-absorbed type. This was not leading anywhere--who was going to read the diary of a self-confessed neurotic who had nothing to reveal but his own neurosis about which he himself knew very little?--so I undertook an ambitious but unconventional new novel which I thought would seduce publishers and agents as strongly as Tessie's ass had seduced me.

Becca's orgasms, if she had them, flowed through her with the unperturbable subtlety of gravitational waves

To be frank, I keep mentioning Tessie but my passion for her was not yet even near. My love interest had moved from Gala to Becca, approximately my "fourth wife". Sometimes I think that it is Becca I should have married, because I do not remember one moment I was with her I did not have an erection. Conversely, to her the idea of me without a hard on was inconceivable, and she told me so herself. But this is probably just talk because I never actually lived with her. If I had, fatigue would surely have set in, as it has in all my relations.

      Becca was about my age. She had an elfish look about her that could be taken either for innocence or mischievousness. Her body was not spectacular but there was nothing wrong with it either. She was of French-Spanish-Moroccan-Jewish ancestry and had left a rich husband much older than she was to fend for herself as translator in various languages and as all-purpose office-services provider. The latter meant she knew state-of-the-art office software backward and forward. I met her through an acquaintance she wanted to bed and couldn't because he had a Dulcinea-fixation. He was in love with a "princess" who had rejected him and he could no more be faithless to her than if she, instead of a cold shoulder, had offered herself to him naked on a silver platter, an I-love-you-forever-and-ever card playing "Here Comes the Bride" attached to her belly-button. Gordak was his name and we will meet him again in connection to my last dash at making it big in the business world, prior to my going to London and a life so topsy turvy the San Andreas Fault in comparison is a rocking chair.

      It is possible that Becca and I began going out together by default, but I didn't care because I was not in love with her and I don't think she ever was in love with me and we had a great time together. I cannot remember any memorable conversation we ever had, although it was tacit between us that we were high-class types with excellent taste in all things. We never talked sex either, but sex was always like an unobtrusive third member in our group, idly drinking whatever we were having and just waiting for the slightest hint from us to start acting like a Satyr high on aphrodysiacs.

      There was one occasion I remember when Becca and I did talk of sex, as opposed to just engaging in it, and that was when I mentioned the possibility of our inviting others to join our fun and she said wistfully that it was possible if we were together and we hired young servants willing to work after hours. It was obvious this was something she hadn't improvised then and there. And that I think is getting to the essence.

      Becca was the sort of person who could travel across an ocean to have sex with a man from whom she said she could expect a proposal, which was just daydreaming, and call me to have sex with her (without saying so in so many words) and even hint that this was the real purpose of her trip, which I could believe. In other words, nothing stood between our enjoyment of each other, not others, not professional matters, not any subject or theme in any language, and our reciprocal commitment was both as strong as a loving marriage and as flimsy as a one-night stand. Consequently, I do Becca no injustice if in thinking of her I suggest a comparison with Gina, partly to explain my relationship with Becca, partly to show that I am not being subconsciously repetitive.

      Gina was the more attractive of the two in a physical sense. She was a slut in a brazen way that Becca could only hint at. From Gina I could expect betrayal any moment my libido faltered but it was not possible for Becca to betray me even if I was only one in a line of erections she was servicing in one night in one hotel, because she made me feel, be it true or be it false, that if I wanted her to stay with me rather than go on with her rounds she would.

      This impression, now that I think of it, could possibly be explained from another curious observation about Becca, which was that, although she must have enjoyed sex and she occasionally demonstrated very discreetly that she was enjoying it, she never, unlike Gina, made a lot of noise and if she did have orgasms, which she must have, they flowed through her with the unperturbable subtlety of gravitational waves. As I say, I do not know what would have happened if I had put Becca to a continence test. I suppose she would not have passed it and thus the difference between her and Gina would be that Becca was much better at dissimulating her lust which made it all the more brazen and enticing to me.

      These observations, incidentally, are in line with my thesis about my emotional sterility, an obvious counterpart to my having born physically sterile. I was incapable of occupying the middle ground between sex and sentiment which is love. Sentiment was an annoyance I could only feign to experience. Sex was possible only when it was rinsed of all sentiment. But I may be exaggerating when I exclude love entirely from my emotional constitution. It is also possible I am caricaturing Becca's feelings, because she did professional work for me as a gift. I can think of no greater act of generosity and I know of no adequate way to repay her for it--short of living and having sex round-the-clock with her--which means there must be a soft spot in my heart for her whatever I might have said about the basic level of our relationship. I know this sounds circular and I could make it less so if I eliminated the "short of" aside, but this I cannot honestly do.

If it was in my power to do it all over again I wouldn't think about it twice, and I would probably make another hash of it and end up wishing for another try

My new novel, which Becca word-processed on the strength alone of her belief in my talent, was both very simple and highly complex. I have disparaged it elsewhere as a whodunit with two characters, but this is unfair to myself because in that genre motivations and ambiances and all sorts of twists can be as suspenseful as a multitude of cardboard suspects. My intention was to establish a contrast between a perfect insider and a perfect outsider--the structure of the work was a dialogue--in which the insider is the killer and the ostensible public enemy, whom everything condemns and who acts guilty as hell, unmasks the deceitful insider. Success depended on holding the reader's attention until the tables were turned. To do this, the intrigue had to be kept to a bare minimum and the development should have been brief and to the point. Given my obsession with introspection and with symbols and with literary allusions, I overloaded the dialogue and the work ran to many more pages than it should have. I did not derive the idea from successful two-character suspense plays I had seen--they usually worked with big names like Olivier or Christopher Reeves--but I was consciously under the influence of my old friend le nouveau roman (especially the work of Claude Simon), which at the time I still did not consider a literary dead-end. I found an artsy publisher for my novel, but the reviews were poor and sales never took off. The publisher didn't either, but I wasn't about to assume the blame for this as I had assumed it for my father's suicide.

      Later, I had this novel drawn and quartered into different stories and quite truthfully I don't remember if its original title was The Language Clinic or The Interrogation. This stumble in my literary career hurt, but it did not deter me. I wasn't making a living off my writing, not at any rate anything to compare with my income as businessman, so I assumed a shrug-it-all-off attitude and decided to make this clear to the literary world. I did this in two ways, both eventually nugatory, although this statement requires qualification, if only to make clear I am not talking about nougat.

      What do I mean exactly by "nugatory"? The question could seem like a tiny ripple in this ocean of words, but it is so important everything I am doing could hinge on my response, although if I made a point of it I could say the same thing of every sentence I've written so far. All it takes is a little imagination and patience, but the adoption of this method could lead to infinite sprawl and I do not have life enough left for that. For instance: I am trying to encompass a complex thing here and I know that each step I take encompasses a little bit and my hope is that all the little bits will add up to a large and truthful canvass (truthful to what, incidentally?) but there are two difficulties here: one is that each step may not be enough for even the bit of reality it wants to cover and the second one is that there are many directions each step could go, not infinitely many because space in practice is not infinitely divisible but a great many indeed, say, the 360 degrees into which a full circle is divided.

      But getting back to "nugatory", it could mean either that my new initiatives were not successful or that I could have spent my time doing better things. But what is "better"? And as to "successful", isn't the whole point of this exercise that I have not been "successful"? On the other hand, who can make the opposite claim, fully, without reservations or second thoughts or regrets of any kind? I know it is normal to say: "Different from what I am?  Spare me! Je ne regrette rien! I would do everything exactly the same way! I did it my way! And so on." A Spanish author said it a bit less boastfully by claiming that he wouldn't change the skin he had gotten used to. That's fair enough. But "normal" as a rule is not my thing--one cannot rule out unruliness--and if it was in my power to do it all over again I wouldn't think about it twice, and I would probably make another hash of it and end up wishing for another try. Essentially, I am against counterfactuals. Things are as they are and as far as "nugatory" goes what I mean is that I did not derive from my literary experiences all that I expected from them.

My Lucifer pride was expanding faster than the fumarole in a corn field that grew into an ill-tempered volcano in less time than it took the astonished peasant to stop dreaming about his toasty tortillas and run for cover

One of those nugatory experiences, then, was a guide for the prospective car-buyer. Now, cars for me are and have always been strictly instrumental. The Jag was just a bit of showing off I indulged in. Also, I have always been a speed freak and with that vehicle there was no way that any one anywhere was going to overtake me, except cops, if I let them, for I felt no urgent need to get into dangerous high-speed chases. So basically the choice of a commercial edition about buying automobiles was gratuituous from a personal stand point and completely calculated for effect. It was a thorough work, but then the research it required was on the level of a high school paper. The quality and presentation could have been better, but this only meant I was not serious about the project from a long-term perspective, which should surprise no one at this point as I have offered no indications about what sort of perspectives I was contemplating for my life.

      Strangely, I was not entirely ignored by the litterati and their chroniclers in the media and on the occasion of an interview I had neither expected nor asked for--during which I did like Lepanto and ordered a bottle of Meursault to my office (my interviewer, a very serious-looking girl, unlike me, was not impressed by such frivolity)--when asked about my oeuvre I slowly and deliberately enunciated that I considered the car-buyer's guide my "masterpiece". I knew that would get into print and what I wanted to communicate was my disdain for reputations and poses. This might have been the effect it had. It certainly did not enhance my standing in the literary community--this was probably one of the reasons why Lepanto after saying I was a genius concluded I was a nonperson--but I didn't care. I was willing to forego the praise, even the recognition, of my peers, because I was aiming at higher goals. My Lucifer pride, always a potential trap, was beginning to expand, like an Icelandic lava flow or like Paricutín, the volcano that began as a fumarole in a corn field and grew into an ill-tempered mountain in less time than it took the astonished peasant to stop dreaming about his toasty tortillas and run for cover. I would later prove to be less fleet of foot.

      The other project I undertook was more serious and it got me a lot of attention from a select few. Being a businessman gave me the advantage that I could ignore my pretentious literary colleagues. But I wasn't about to leave well alone. I mean, I couldn't. It was in the nature of things. In brief, I founded a book review so high- brow I knew it would not be a newstand hit and I offered it through subscriptions, of which it garnered quite a few because of its promise to review or list or in some way mention every book coming out of the presses. It also obtained some "institutional advertising"--the type that was given as a reward for trying and could be withdrawn at any moment--but the best I managed was to break even and the project became indifferent to me and I let it go after I had lost some money, not a lot but enough to be discouraging. While it lasted, I wrote under my name or under a pseudonym and I gave myself the luxury of frying any one I wanted. It wasn't in front of a mass audience, but it got to the authors and publishers who sometimes bothered to pester and even attack me. This was yet another succès d'éstime.

      There were at least two occasions I still remember in which my reviews raised some blisters. One concerned a historical novel by Locksmith (the one that said all his countrymen were lunatics) which contained a lot of anachronisms--I knew they were the author's because any fool but that fool knew that Uncle Sam had not fought at Yorktown--and I found it was ungrammatical from start to end. The publisher called up indignantly to say he had slavishly followed the manuscript, which is when I reached my conclusion about the author being an illiterate.

      The other occasion was my pseudonymous review of one of Potsherd's satires and I don't know what piqued him but he was after me for an hour trying to find out who wrote it. I still wonder why it never crossed his mind I could have been the critic whose name he so coveted. Maybe he thought I was incapable of irony. I just hope he's still curious, but I doubt it because he must be approaching 100.

      The other stuff I remember writing for my literary magazine were short articles on my own works, of which I think we have an overabundance. Just to maintain the Luciferian pridefulness and hubris routine, I will say that I was suitably metaphysical in a commentary on Doing Time. Anyway, the book review was a "subperiod" in my "businessman period", but I never thought of it as being in the nature of an investment.

Through my miraculous friend Paresia, I get involved in the world's largest producer of something

My happenstance approach to business is best exemplified by the anecdote about how I got involved in the world's largest producer of ammonium chloride and sodium sulphate. I remember the final products involved those names and I am pretty sure that's the right combination because I know I did not invest in a salt pan. How I got into that was as coincidental as a business decision can be.

      I had a flat tire very late one night in a very empty road near nowhere and when I went for the jack and the spare to my horror I found neither. The explanation for this lapse was that I usually left such things to my driver and my trip was an impromptu with a woman I met in a bar, the same night I verbally bludgeoned Aryaca by suggesting he put a gumshoe in his wife's closet. I met my woman after he left shouting to himself and making like a collar with both hands. I wasn't keen to be by myself with my guilty conscience so I became loquacious with my bar stool neighbor, who just happened to have nothing to do that week-end. Well, I am sure what she wanted was not spending a night in a lonely road and maybe, since there weren't Jaguar concessionaires in every corner and the tires my car took were of a special kind, having to spend the whole week end fixing a flat.

      As the euphoria of that night's adventure started to wear off, I began to have bleak thoughts, especially when my new-found companion first said the inevitable: "What a bitch!" I could have asked if she was talking to herself but I refrained and almost as a reward I saw headlights approaching at the speed of sound. I jumped to the side of the road and waved like mad--even though I knew my best chance was just a ride into some hick town and maybe access to a phone--but the car went past us quicker than thinking and I heard myself saying: "What a bitch!" To my surprise, and gratitude, the flash of light that had just passed braked ahead and began reversing and when its backstop lights got close enough I was amazed to see it was another Jaguar exactly like mine! Needless to say, its owner and I became immediate soulmates.

      Hector Paresia was very healthy and good looking and he was trying to escape a reputation as a gigolo through an association with a friend who had a dream: to build and run a big big factory. As I eventually and painfully learned, his partner, Mike Veritas, didn't care what kind of factory it was--it could even be said that he didn't even care if it was profitable--as long as it was very big and very costly. Hector sold me on the project during the time I was still overawed by our salvationist chance encounter. The only good thing about my involvement in it was I did not lose anything other than reputation and time, because fortunately my share in the company was acquired by putting up collaterals, which I transferred from my name to a fictitious corporation in Bonaire--that's an island off South America with more banks than inhabitants, or goats, and there are plenty of these--at the same time I signed the bank's papers, give or take a few hours. The loss of reputation would try to haunt me later, but I was then safely ensconced in a flat in Tenttown, a London suburb famous for its strawberry-picking festival, to enter which people sometimes queue for a week and do strenous handstretching exercises.

      The things I now know about the chemical plant I got involved in through Paresia I pieced together even as the work of building it was going on according to blueprints for which Veritas paid enough money to paper a large sitting room with $1000 bills. The Spanish designers of the plant guaranteed that it would work if the instructions were followed to the letter and to prove it they took Paresia and Veritas to selected sites around the world. Veritas thought that building a factory made of high-quality titanium with enough pipes to simulate a plate of linguini was like playing with Leggo. He couldn't have been more mistaken. That was mistake number one. Mistake number two involves a story in itself and it is not exclusively about business.

The only way to tell the whores from the thrill-seekers was that the former would often tell me: "Come on, baby, let me have a douche-full of what you've got"

I met Jop Burmah through a Flemish trader named van Yeck who held the record for sleeping twenty four hours in a plane in economy class including lay overs. With this feat he became the talk of the trade, the closest to a legend there is in the chemical business. I don't remember how I met van Yeck but I must have been drunk. Jop was interested in getting the distribution rights for the huge supplies of the sodium metasilicate and ammonium selenate or whatever it was we were going to make. I knew it was like mixing chili con carne and pork and beans and getting chili with pork and carne and beans. Veritas was very suspicious at first and Paresia, who at the time was very much under the other's influence, as I was under Paresia's because of our near-miraculous acquaintance, nodded emphatically when Veritas spoke. It was more of a strong tic than a nod--like when some one pulls on a tight shirt-collar but very quick--but it expressed unmistakable agreement and support. Burmah had to exert himself in order to convince them of his good faith and that he wasn't out for a cheap buck. I liked Burmah and I was for him and, to be quite honest, although I pretended to accept Veritas' assurances that he knew what he was doing I remained profoundly sceptical. In fact, I was always very sceptical about all my business ventures and, to tell the whole truth, about the entire business of living. The only serious-minded thing I have done in my life I am doing now and if I had my druthers I would as soon forget it, but I know I wouldn't be able to.

      Whether Veritas and Paresia where wrong or right in their expectations, I saw nothing wrong in accepting Jop's offer and rightly so because at that stage he was getting exclusive rights to exactly nothing and he had an office and contacts with foreign buyers and suppliers. It was Jop who in the course of our relationship--during which I never stopped keeping tabs on those two aces Veritas and Paresia--would enlighten me on the true nature of our enterprise. Our friendship which began as purely business proposition soon flowered on a purely personal foundation, from which it developed anarchically to intimacies that ultimately did it in. The personal foundation was at first our shared interest in having a high old time.

      The nature of my arrangement with Becca was not formal and did not preclude either my dalliances or hers, and this was as I indicated perhaps the secret of our admirable sexual coordination. Jop's marriage, from all I could tell, was on the rocks, although he claimed his wife was going through a phase. She would come back. She knew who was buttering her bread. To be frank, I didn't believe him, but I didn't give a hoot.

      We started going out together almost nightly. We had a few drinks and I lit up a few cigarettes and after left the pack on the table for the waiters. Cigarettes weren't expensive then, but my insouciance reflected a general attitude which cumulatively was as if I were trying to burn money. At least in our bent for doing away with money in largely useless ways, Veritas and I were as one. Burmah was an exercise freak and he drank very little and did not smoke. Our thing was doing the rounds of the bars where the horny congregated and whores were often indistinguishable from thrill-seekers. The latter were mostly attractive women who could be divided into those who were between marriages, and knew it, or hoped, and young girls who thought that for whatever reason, including their own reluctance, marriage was not presently in the cards for them. The less attractive were usually older than the average but their appetite seemed to be stronger. They were very much like Becca yet completely different. The difference had to do with their total indifference to personal exchanges, on which, as I have explained, Becca was also quite reticent except on her genuine affection for me.

      With these Beccas, then, which were the easiest to pick up, unless some one much younger than I was happened to be near, it was like having a dog with a diploma from a sexology clinic: you could tell them where to lick and to lay down and turn over and wait for their rewards and they would do it with alacrity and even put in a personal touch, for after all they weren't really pooches and I do not mean to insult their memories, as I did not mean to make Pushkin seem more than a dog even if that is the impression I might have fostered. In sum, every one I met in those bars was completely disinhibited in bed from the word go and the only the way to recognize the whores was that they usually asked for a "little gift" and were over-eager to see you come and made whore-like talk in your ears, like: "Come on, baby, let me have a douche-full of what you've got", and so on.

The rule of thumb is that whores are dimwits but can seem sparky because they are professionally suspicious, except naturally of pimps

Jop and I used to bet on who was faster picking up a broad. There was no way to verify the follow up, because there was the occasional incompatibility on the way to bed, so the wagers were settled on a who-puts-his-hand-on-her-ass-first basis. Whoever of us did, made sure the other was looking by snapping the fingers of the free hand as if calling for the bartender, who was usually too busy to notice. We always acknowledged the signal. What was the point of cheating? All we bet was the next evening's dinner and drinks. I thought I was a millionaire, which I wasn't, and Jop had recently closed some good deals importing and selling chemicals. We were so close that one night we even went to bed together with two merry divorcees. We took turns at screwing them and occasionally rubbed thighs. When Burmah confided to me later that he was bisexual, I didn't say anything but that was when I came up with the idea for the bets.

      One day Jop told me that his wife Nancy was finally coming home. He said she was broad-minded (those were his words) and that we could still go out together. I was impatient to meet Nancy, whom I imagined as a very good-looking woman, and I was not disappointed. She looked like a front-line Las Vegas high-kicker. She was tall and curvaceous and she did her blonde hair tight, which underscored her perfectly chiselled cheekbones and the deep blue of her eyes. I think the suddenness of my attraction was like love, but I also knew it was the impossible dream and it did not make large claims on my attention or my time, especially as Jop seemed to be out of this world escorting Nancy around. Her arrival did not break up our act. It merely changed it. We made a terrific trio and soon we had our own table in different restaurants.

      As I was free, but for my tenuous links to Becca, Jop and Nancy accompanied me on my fishing expeditions to the same bars he and I used to hang around, only now we sat at one of the tables near the bar rather that at the bar itself. I was at first suprised that Nancy didn't mind--after all, it was like Burmah telling her what he had been doing while she was away--but then I had the idea followed by the certainty that she felt very much at ease in such places. My interest in her suddenly became much more alert. But I did not show it and went on acting the way I did before Nancy arrived.

      When I made a pick up--which often in such places was just a question of eye contact--I would take her to our table, where Nancy and my new "friend" usually chatted as if they were blood sisters from way back or, as I liked to think in my habitually dirty manner, as if they worked in the same whorehouse. But I did try to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak (read: avoid out and out prostitutes), because I did not want to impose a dimwit on Nancy, who read a lot and loved ballet. Let me make clear that I am aware not all whores are dimwits. The rule of thumb is that they are but can seem sparky because they are professionally suspicious, except naturally of pimps.

      I noticed that Jop was obsequious with Nancy but she was usually hard-faced to him. Things evolved to a point such that, even if I had just brought some one to the table, Nancy seemed to prefer talking to me than to Jop. It was as if she were telling me: "Hey, what are you doing with that illiterate when you can have me to talk to?" It was a bit embarrassing because basically she was still the forbidden fruit and although I liked being the object of her attention I could do nothing with it and I still felt that she and Jop had to be left alone to work out their relationship, which was what Jop kept saying to my increasing incredulity. None of this prevented me from having fantasies about Nancy when I was laying other women. All that I am relating took place in a relatively short space of time during which in theory the main connection between Jop and me should have been our reciprocal business interests.

      Veritas was busy at the plant site. I went there in my little plane with some frequency and he explained his diversification plans, which included pre-fabrication of concrete panels for houses--I thought to myself that in a really hot summer they could double as ovens--and the installation of port facilities to berth the huge barges that would carry our immense production of sodium penthotal and ammonium hyperhexagonal to an endless line of waiting freighters. Whatever might have happened later in life to Veritas I am sure of one thing, which is that he was totally fulfilled during the time it took the plant to come on stream. Paresia for his part was as happy to follow Veritas as a disciple can be. His contribution to the cause consisted in speeches during which his tic became more pronounced. Mostly what I did was observe, but as everyone knew of my friendship with Burmah I was named company liaison for marketing, which sounded great and I even had a desk of my own in Jop's premises. If you think for one minute, however, that I was seriously thinking that this was anything but a joke, you have not understood one thing of what I have written about myself. I will admit it is not easy to comprehend a life that is being lived as if it wasn't being lived, but that's about the size of it.

      Jop's office was a clean, well-lighted place--theoretically then where Hemingway could have been happy instead of blowing his head off--and especially it was fully equipped for its time. Incredible but true being one of the characteristics of our age, the internet, the web covering it, and e-mailings within it were not there yet, but only some five to ten years away, the range being between the first time I used the internet and the time I realized every one was communicating through a keyboard attached to something improbably called cyberspace.

In a moment of weakness the forbidden fruit and I betray my best friend who happened to be her husband

Jop relied on telexes and faxes and he could find out about chemicals and their markets anything he wanted in no time flat. It was through telex--a devise for rapid communication which habitually mispelled words and had a tendency to make paragraphs at the wrong places--that I found out from Jop that one could buy the stuff we were going to produce at about a quarter of the price we were planning to charge just to break even. When I discovered this, I smiled and changed nothing in my routine because after all I was just going through the motions. I told Veritas and Paresia but they tut-tutted the whole thing and explained to me the multiple uses to which ammonium acetate and sodium bicarbonate could be put to, but I knew then and there the entire project was bogus and the only way it would work would be through a miracle. This made me both despondent and cynical and it was probably as a consequence of this complex mood that the following incident must be understood.

      One evening I invited Jop and Nancy to my place. Nancy arrived first, explained that Jop would be late from work, and before you could say licketysplit, she was all over me saying she knew my feelings for her, which were mutual, and was French-tonguing me as if she was trying to dig an artesian well in my mouth. Even before we had to pause for breath, we were half naked and doing everything to each other on a leather couch. When we finally managed to get half organized for the real screw, we had only seconds before climaxing simultaneously to loud screaming and groaning. And just in the nick of time too, because we had barely finished dressing, and Nancy had stuck her scarlet bikini in my mouth, when the bell rang and I walked, slowly to ease the panting, and let Burmah in. Nancy, I told Jop, had just arrived and was in the bathroom. Burmah noticed nothing, or appeared not to. I did not feel ashamed.

      Despite Nancy's declaration and our frenzied encounter, I had some misgivings because the whole thing was so unexpected it could have been planned by Jop and her. Such things were well known in literature, but this was real life where men tend to be possessive about their wives, and Burmah seemed especially hoggish with his luscious and clever wife. Yet he couldn't have helped noticing Nancy's interest in me and the way the two acted towards each other could have been a put on, and who the hell knew anyway how other people got their kicks.

      With these thoughts I was doubtless rationizing what in essence was an act of unmitigated betrayal for which in retrospect I can only say in justification that Nancy caught me off base and that I was weak about such a beautiful woman offering herself to me in such a complete and passionate manner. I realize that I should have pushed her off me when she grabbed my head and put her lips to my mouth and that I should have buttoned back her blouse when she snapped it off--I was surprised the buttons didn't come off, but they were the soft, satiny kind--and that I should have told her to put her bikini back on immediately, and so on, but there was the obstacle that, if I thought life was a joke, why should I have been excluding her and her husband from it? That night we had a gay and hearty dinner, more so than usual, but I kept wondering if something was not going on behind my back.

      In the days and weeks that followed, Nancy took care to dispell my suspicions although I never actually voiced them. It turned out that my friend Jop Burmah was something of a sadist. That didn't surprise me a whole lot and it certainly wasn't enough to make me feel as if cuckolding him (if that's what it was) was not exactly what he deserved. One thing for sure, I wasn't about to tell him how he was getting his comeuppance. Besides, perhaps monstrously, my friendly feelings for him had not changed because his wife's friendly feelings towards me were such they could compromise mine. Nancy also explained that she had asked for divorce many times and Jop had refused. Her return was not the reconciliation that Burmah thought it would be. She was there to have it out definitely with him. But she was hesitant because she feared he would become violent, and now there was her relationship with me!

      I began to see that Nancy was more serious than I was about our future together. It wasn't that I didn't want her. It was just that I did not feel I could commit myself in the complete way she seemed to desire. One thing that did change was that I began to go out less frequently with both of them. That Jop was not surprised at this surprised me again but not that much except casually as more sauce for the goose I was cooking about Jop not minding if I had his wife. For this I came up with ever weirder theories, such as that it was a condition that Nancy imposed for their being together, which would have defeated Jop's avowed intentions about their marriage, or that this was a game they had played before and that I had nothing to worry about.

      None of these imaginary plots deterred me from carrying on my affair with Nancy, whom I met during the day at my place, or in hers when Burmah was away. She would always have excuses not to go out at night. I was alone in my place, having my usual drinks, sometimes doing cash flows for the different small investments I had made and were uniformly in trouble until after the third drink, when the pictures became rosier. If it was possible, she would call me and we both masturbated, which was a relaxing way to take my mind off business. Things had happened so fast and I was becoming so infatuated I had put remorse entirely aside. Whenever I thought about the moral aspects of the situation, I always had to hand Nancy's story of Burmah's marital violence. This alternated with the other ploy about Jop knowing because Nancy had already told him. I did not ask myself what would happen if Nancy had actually gotten Burmah to give her a divorce. I went as far as to think it was possible to go on indefinitely being Jop's friend and his wife's lover and this insouciance was what brought about the next dramatic turn in our relations, to put it rather delicately.

      I had accepted Jop's invitation to have dinner at his house. Nancy of course would be there. Burmah had set everything at a low, round Moorish-style table. We began with drinks as usual, more perhaps than usual. Then came the food and wines. Jop was serving and every time he got up Nancy would lean over and fondle me, which made the dinner a curious experience in gourmet brinkmanship. I was getting very excited. After dinner Jop brought coffee and Cognac. Then he went out to get a bottle of Krueger he was keeping for last. Nancy was wearing a loose Oriental robe. It was rather plain and I kept thinking of what lay underneath although of course I knew well enough and what was happening was that liquor was making me reckless. The only light in the room came from a small lamp on a table. Nancy gave me her most lubricious smile. She was sitting her legs folded sideways and now she sat up and opened them wide raising her smock to her knees. I couldn't have timed more accurately what next happened if I had used a stopwatch.

      Burmah entered just as I was reaching out and into Nancy. We were all very drunk, but I did hear clearly when he said "Whatda!" I looked up and saw Burmah shake himself as if he were a big shaggy dog. Nancy's face changed and in an instant she was on her feet scurrying up the stairs. Burmah leapt after her and had her cornered on a landing before I had time to even gather my thoughts. I too quickly grasped what was happening and rushed up. Burmah turned from banging Nancy's head against the wall and gave me a murderous look. Jop was a strong guy and, witnessing now that what he was doing matched perfectly Nancy's description of their private marital spats, I thought I was a goner. But Jop just closed his eyes and shook himself again. He shouted: "Get out, out, before I kill you!"

      I rushed Nancy to my car and we fled through the night to my place. We didn't talk at all. When we got to my room we fucked until morning and then fell asleep from sheer shock and exhaustion.

      When I awoke, everything that had happened during the previous weeks came to my mind like a whirlwind. I tried getting out of bed and all I could manage was to cover my grimacing face. Nancy saw the state I was in and understood. She was so cool I couldn't believe it. I kept thinking that Burmah knew, that he must have known! That didn't seem to meld with his manifestly unfriendly reaction to my probing his wife's crotch, but it was all I could think over and over and over. Ultimately, the thought was tainted by reality. Nancy was a calming influence. She said everything would be alright. It was her responsibility and she would deal with it. She herself called a taxi and left. I could not understand how she had done it, but I felt relieved that she was gone.

I longed to be inside a Trollope novel and not the unbelievable mess I had gotten myself into

I spent that day in bed. In the evening I got a call from an associate who told me that Burmah was gunning for me. I didn't dare ask about Nancy. Next day I dressed to go out. I thought that sooner or later I would have to face Burmah so it might as well be sooner than later. If I was going to get it, then so be it. Besides, I did want to know what was happening to Nancy. Inwardly I was trying to find some justification but all that bubbled up in my mind was the unmanly thought that I wasn't to blame and that it was her fault. Maybe after all she and Burmah did like that sort of thing. I tried to remember scabrous situations in literature. A monk who had fallen in love with a bitch. A woman who kept saying: "Je pourrais manger tes étrons". There was Sade of course and that old pornographer Henry Miller. But I wasn't a character in a novel. I remembered with longing the ethical purity of ordinary decent people in Victorian novels. Things had changed since then. But still, I thought, why couldn't I find myself inside a work by Trollope instead of this fucken unbelievable mess? 

      I was paralyzed when I saw Burmah approach me at the office. He looked sombre but not threatening. That didn't make me feel any better. We shook hands. I couldn't believe it. Was I going to get off so easily? Jop mumbled something about alcohol and that Nancy was a difficult woman. But our friendship was over. Again, I felt relieved. I didn't dare ask about Nancy. But she called. It was a love call and I was even more unbelieving than I had been at any time before. She said that Burmah had agreed to a divorce but that he wanted her to go away. She had agreed to that. Although Nancy didn't say so, I understood that as soon as things quieted down, we could finally be together without such troublesome details as adultery and betrayal. I agreed by not disagreeing. Burmah and I avoided each other. This became easy when Veritas' chemical giant after many months of making him delirious was switched on and it rumbled, farted, and died.

      I wasn't surprised and to be honest I once again felt relieved because if it had worked and it had started pouring out the sodium hexametaphosphate and the ammonium chromic sulphate it was going to pour, I knew that trying to sell the stuff would have been to prolong the agony. Veritas didn't see it that way and after trying to work his way through the linguini he called in the Spanish engineers who had sold him the blueprints and they looked over the mess and concluded that everything was in place alright but that, maybe, the linguini wasn't al dente or Veritas hadn't known how to prepare the sauce. Linguini after all was just an ingredient. Basically, they went back and forth and sent a couple of memos and washed their hands and since Veritas had insisted on assembling the plant himself instead of letting the experts do it we had to live with the results.

      Paresia stood by his friend Veritas--he had to naturally because he was as responsible as Veritas for the project--and his tic became almost continuous as the news got worse. He was a natural optimist and bridge-builder and he soldiered on, but he was no fool and while he put up a respectable front he was not neglecting his powers of seduction. These eventually paid off with a made-in-heaven marital alliance to a rich widow which permitted him to put the past behind him and even to be sardonic about Veritas, whom he laughingly mentioned as a whimsical eccentric, implying that he had gone along with him for the laughs.

      Of Jop Burmah I haven't heard since, though I imagine he must be alright because he was a street fighter and it was he who saw through Veritas'and Paresia's self deceptions. Nancy and I met one more time, but that was in London and I am so undelighted by that encounter I try not to think about it, so I just mention it casually and will give a rain check to be made good later, though probably not.

On a hiking expedition I meet Ordak who offers me a golden apple with a worm inside it

I said that my own finances seemed to improve before they deteriorated. To explain I have to mention my father again and his equivocations about money. Between the Taxiarch and him they could have built a little financial empire, but they did not waste love on each other. The Taxiarch had a patronizing affection for his brother and he blamed me for his problems. He had never approved of my parents' marriage, which was something on which we agreed wholeheartedly though we never openly said so. Their individual fortunes were much less than they seemed, in the case of the Taxiarch because of his early retirement at thirty-five; in the case of my father because of his strenuous but unavailing efforts to build a fortress and to manipulate or hold back the world outside. This is by way of saying that what I inherited, much diminished from its greatest bulk, was just money without connections. Money is fine but it is better if it is fruitfully engaged and you have a network you can fall back on. That wasn't my case. I had either to get close to some economic power, and I didn't even have enough money to make an impression on a small bank, or invest seriously on my own, which I wasn't going to do in such a way that would detract from my self-absorption.

      Essentially, I should have closed my father's office, put the money in a trust fund, and acted like a poor, struggling writer. But that's not what I did because I fell for the temptation of having a high salary and an office of my own and feeling contemptuous about my less talented and less well off literary colleagues. I could do this as long as the money was placed at high interest rates in mortgages and such, but these were just expedients and to rely on them over the long run I had to devote my life to being a moneylender, which is what I was but wasn't likely to settle for during the rest of my life. I needed adventure and risks and playing parts and going to edges, so I can claim that like my father I too did it my way.

      Aside from these financial dabblings, I also made different small investments. Some worked, the fewer; others drained away more than I replenished. Every small investment had to do with some minor interest or vagary I had. This was not the way to cut a path in the economic world and eventually I found myself like Dante in a dark forest. 

      I had been retrenching from my ill-advised projects except the book review, which was near break even and had a palpable usefulness despite my boredom with it. There were minor glitches with the loans I had made but they all came in a wave. This gave me the impression of going under and that was getting too close to real danger for my taste.

      To balance my physical excesses, basically the drinking, and also as a distraction from my real or imagined cares, I was into mountain climbing and hiking and I got so good at this I could run up a very steep slope with a full backpack and need only a minute or so to recover and do it again. Admittedly, it was not a very inventive exercise, but compared to jogging, which demands complete cerebral paralysis, it was relatively challenging, and the views were panoramic and gave food for philosophical speculations like those of Harry Lime in The Third Man about the similarities between humans and bugs. I did not for all that consider they could be squashed without qualms. Squashing I thought would not be so bad. Avoiding the qualms was much tougher. Sometimes during a good night's drinking I would go out and climb a hill just to prove I could do it with the result that I perspired a lot and the proportion of alcohol in my blood increased, so I would go up relatively sober and come down dead drunk without having had another drink. As this was a contradiction in terms too shocking even for me, I only did it the few times it took me to be sure that the results of those excursions were what I suspected them to be.

      It was in one of my regular excursions that I again encountered Gordak, whom I mentioned as the bearer of a Dulcinea complex who had spurned Becca, and we struck a friendship. He was a straight shooter, as you would expect from a man with the strength of character to persist in loving a woman with such unrequited passion, and he was very savvy about finances. When the end came, I had no choice but to conclude that his idealism awesome as it was did not preclude a tinge of skulduggery. Since I have always been a moral sceptic, an attitude you will remember I refined at Kings from my reading of St. Augustine, I should have known there had to be a worm in the golden applea that Gordak soon offered me. This was his invitation for me to enter as partner in an open-ended mutual fund he was creating. I did not at first buy his pitch, which anyhow was low-key and only sporadic, but the loans I had made were still giving me headaches and I didn't like this one bit.

      My reasoning was that I had a commodity others wanted very much, namely money, and if I condescended to help them by lending it, they should at least have the decency not to make extaordinary claims on my time and my tranquility. I did not like taking harsh measures. I did not like the complications of having properties I would have to manage or dispose of or hold for profits I wanted instantly. I wanted my rent and I did not want those that produced it for me to jeopardize my enjoyment of it, for what would then have been the purpose?

      Gordak was a true salesman and he did not give up on me. He did not become intrusive but the repetition of his pitch for the mutual fund must have been registering in my mind. Besides he had a partner I also knew and he was much more pushy about the investment. So here we had a kind of nice cop/tough cop situation with a suspect who was about ready to confess to anything in order to get a load off his mind. Besides, what Gordak and his partner were offering seemed perfectly above board and if it worked it would be the making of us all. It meant that Gordak would be the chief analyst buying and selling at his discretion, which I had to accept on trust, but I did know that the other flanks were covered: management, promotion, sales, etc. If the scheme functioned as we wanted it to, half the profits from all the investments would be ours, so instead of investing x number of dollars in stock, I was investing the same amount of money in shares which would be draining profits from a portfolio much bigger and diverse than I could ever afford. Trouble was going to loom from an unexpected quarter.

      I was not being frivolous about this investment. I was dipping only to the extent that I could not readily conceive I would be making so much money. I did feel somewhat diminished in that I was putting up my money to profit from some one else's expertise but, one, my partners too had put up money--they already had an expensive office with salaried personnel when I joined them--and they, and Gordak in particular, were used to doing something I didn't even want to bother with. Besides, when I tried to make my own conditions, such as overseeing how my money was spent, they made sure I understood I was entering either as an equal and trusting partner (especially trusting) or not at all. Would they have let me go if I had hung tough? I don't know, but I wasn't in a mood to be tough. I was getting perilously sentimental.

      The trauma with Nancy and Jop had not dampened my romantic inclinations or my libidinal urges. I was like the little guy who wants to have a part in a brawl and keeps getting punched out and he keeps getting back in. This time I was entering a battle of my own making in which my adversary had a weapon I had no reason to fear but which she brandished so skilfully I couldn't see the danger until I was skewered. It was as like a swordfight and I practiced thrusts and parries and other fencing techniques and she just stood there and in the first round she sheared off all the buttons on my jacket and punctured my ear lobes. If I had been smarter than I thought I was, I should have laid down my foil and begged to be excused, but I wasn't capable of such cowardice. I mean, OK, a woman can get the better of you at first, or even occasionally, but I had to be the eventual winner. It was ordained. It was the way things were.

      I had become very comfortable with Tessie, but not so that she let me overstep certain bounds. Tessie had always been a tease and when she saw the lusty look in a man she had no compunctions about encouraging it. She was discreet and competent. I knew I could find a substitute for her if I wanted to, but I liked having her around and kept expecting that one day I would bed her without disrupting any of my routines, which I was fond of and were the reason I was seeking stability through Gordak's mutual fund project.

      Tessie played the flirt, but whenever I made insinuating noises, she would demurely remind me of how unstable my affections were, which only made her more desirable to me. Also she was engaged to Bullit, a man who was younger than she was but who kissed the ground she stepped on, which obviously had to do with the fact that he was allowed to kiss other things on which she had a much greater claim. They were engaged but Tessie always found excuses to ward off Bullit's marriage proposals. The essential law of her sexual and romantic life was that all men she felt attracted to were fuckable, but she also took into consideration what she could get from them, as happened with Arrak, the lawyer who handled her divorce from a man who would have killed for her, and the bottom line with Bullit was that he wasn't a good economic prospect. Despite my much better ones, I was not in her "acceptable" category. On the other hand, in the ordinary course of things Tessie would not have formed part of what I considered acceptable.

After a particularly satisfactory session with Tessie, she doses me with the question: "Can we go window-shopping now?"

She was as intellectual as a mite. She did not have one book in her house and she was an unabashed fan of singers and actors. When my father still had his magazine, she was a loyal reader of the astrology section, even though she knew that Lydia and Pointy, the telephone operator and the gofer respectively, wrote it. It was as dumb as if you had bought an absolutely guaranteed, pre-loaded, rechargeable crystal ball, and believed it really could foretell the future! She said she was a fatalist which meant she believed that things happened. But she meant it more in the sense of getting in bed with men. For instance, as long as she demurred I was not in her destiny. She was a beach and sun cultist and carried her tan like a challenge. Her car was never clean and sometimes it stank of wet towels and rotten food. But she also wore a mean bikini and though no longer a young woman she looked as if she was ready to enter a bare-bottoms contest in a moment's notice.

      Tessie was also my confidante whenever troubles arose. She had a way of eliciting revelations and she was there when I needed her personally for emotional or business reasons. She was there to help in putting out fires or to comfort me when I had to look at the desolation. She was both supportive and seductive. In particular, she was my refuge during the Nancy/Jop trauma. If anybody knew my weaknesses and my vulnerabilities it was Tessie. Without my knowing it she was becoming indispensable to me though not the other way around.

      I don't know how she did it, or even if it was she that did it and not some quirk of my psychology. Given my neurosis, the latter is likelier. The long and the short of it was that I had fallen in love again with another woman who, like Gina, I thoroughly despised intellectually. In both cases, my supposed contempt, which I kept carefully under wraps, might have been a subconscious gambit to curb my emotions, which was a double-edged weapon because it seemed that despising only made me more vulnerable to their attractions. There was also an additional complication in that Tessie had begun to entertain higher ambitions precisely when my own hung in the balance of Gordak's mutual fund and I was as usual hoping upon hoping but not feeling overconfident.

      One day I invited her straight out to meet me at a hotel and she said: "OK". I did a double-take but did not lose time. Sex between us was sensational from the start. Or at least it seemed so to me, and the more we engaged in it, which we did daily in rented accommodations near my office, the more I wanted it. It was, I thought then, physically addictive, by which I meant I wanted to have Tessie always and was even ready to take the plunge with her to do so. She did not act as dismissive about this with me as with her previous toy lover, but there were problems and sometimes when I thought of what I was willing to do I had a feeling of being sucked into a dark vortex. It was scary.

      When we went out she loved to go, can you imagine this?, "window-shopping", and I actually put up with this absolute and contemptuous and self-inflicted flouting and degradation of my most sacred values. Window-shopping? My God, that was the equivalent for me of reading Barbara Cartland or being part of a mob of bobby sockers. I felt so demeaned I began to feel seriously depressed.

      On one occasion we were, as I once more regret having to admit, "window-shopping", and she wondered how I would look in a pink tuxedo. "I don't think too much of them", she confessed, and I was stumped as to why she would bother imagining me, a fairly ordinary, unshowy sort of person, in one. She was probably thinking of one of her previous lovers, who as far as I could tell were all younger than I was and would probably have liked being seen in such an outfit. These little things, but they were legion, rankled, and I, who thought of myself as austerely elegant, sometimes consciously decried my passion. But I could not rid myself of it.

      Apart from Tessies's taunts, there were still more complications around the corner. One night we had finished a particularly satisfactory session in bed, I said I would like to bore her ears, which was just a way of saying that I wanted to fuck her out of her brains. Her reaction was to stretch and yawn and ask: "Can we go window shopping now?" It reminded me of the whores at my old haunts and their caressing expressions about giving them all I had, and doing it as quickly as possible. She was definitely taking a much more leisurely view of our relationship than I was, which was poetic justice of sorts as it evened up the situation I had going with Nancy before.

      It was in another one of her relaxed, detached moods--she made me feel as if all the love noises in response to my monstrous erections and indefatigable pumping were rehearsals for admission to the Actors Studio--she informed me of her plans to quit her job with my so-called firm and go on her own. That hit me like a hosing with cold raw sewage. After all, if we were going to get hitched, what was the point of this separation? It was as if the closer I wanted to be to her, the further she herself preferred to be. I could not oppose her perfectly understandable career plans and I presumed they would not mean the end of our affair, but inside I felt some trepidation. I wasn't confident any longer about my inherent advantages. I was now merely hoping that she loved me, as I was hoping that Gordak was right, but I entertained the suspicion that being Tessie's boss gave me an edge which could account for all the "love" she had for me. Then there was also that she would probably ask me for financial help and I could not in good conscience deny it, as in effect happened.

Getting Tessie out of my mind was like a fat man trying to go hungry in a pastry shop

I was becoming extremely insecure. And the way things were going at the mutual fund was not a source of strength. They did not derive from any lack of competence on the part of Gordak or any unsoundness in the project itself, but from "technical" difficulties in finding the appropriate banking institution. Bottom-line, our company was seen as either invasive or untrustworthy or both. We were not being accorded any respect and it did not help that Gordak was being difficult. He did not allow the slightest suggestion of oversight and this only strengthened the hand of our adversaries, which was what banks had become for us.

      I was beginning to despair. My plans for financial stability were crumbling before my very eyes and my high romantic ambitions were crashing against the impregnable tower of Tessie's indifference. In sum, I did not have the double safety net of my office and of my formerly supportive secretary and now uppity unreliable mistress and independent ex-employe, for with my financial support Tessie had left my employ and had quickly found better paying work, too quickly for my now overtly paranoid mentality. What I foresaw and dreaded was the failure of the mutual fund compromising my economic independence-- it wasn't that bad but I had pinned too many hopes in one direction, a classic eggs-in-one-basket situation, precisely the contrary of the mutual fund's basic come on--and my growing attachment to Tessie making me more emotionally dependent on her. I was in danger of becoming worse than a toy lover. I was about to become her toy poodle, and wouldn't that be an irony coming from the person who had been so smugly sarcastic about president Whip-'em-Good's Pomeranian and his Lear Jet?

      I never consciously arrived at the conclusion that our affair was hopeless any way you looked at it, but in desperation one day I wrote a letter to Tessie saying it was over and generously forgiving her debt to me. I might have been expecting her to call and ask me to reconsider, but what I got was another letter that in essence said: "Alright", which was not good, like her "OK" response, and definitely floored me. This wasn't due only to Tessie's attitude, disappointing as it was. It mostly had to do with me.

      I went back to Becca and we had sex as if we had never grown apart, but it was different now. I remembered when I had fantasized with other women about Nancy, but when I tried to do the same thing with Tessie in mind it didn't work, because I had been having her but I hadn't had my fill of her and I had gone and thrust her aside as if I was in a position to do so. But I wasn't. I was vulnerable over my financial position. I despised Tessie and I desired her and the more I despised the more I desired. I was like a fat man trying to go hungry in a pastry shop. I would have done anything to be with her, except to be with her.

      Crucially for my ability to maneuver, the mutual fund finally went under, even before I realized it. What I mean is I was not paying attention because of my wasting emotional struggles and I thought that Gordak could still do a magic trick and pull us through. I got over this illusion the day I went to his house for our usual business meeting and rang the bell till my finger got cramps and went around the house peering into windows to see if I could see his corpse laying in a pool of blood. I had seen his haggard look the night before and I was afraid of the possibility of suicide.

      When the firemen pried the door open--Becca and I raised sufficient alarums to get them to do this--his garden flat was as orderly as a doll's house. But no Gordak. He had taken it on the lam and I never again saw or heard of him. One of his drawcards for the mutual fund was that he claimed he himself had sunk into it every penny he had. I never believed that. His disappearing act made it even less believable. It also put me in mind of my stash in London. I too felt like doing a vanishing. And I had cause. My victory over the ex-Apocrisiary--if parricide could be called a "victory"--was Pyrrhic because in my war with the World I was once again on the defensive although not quite in disorderly flight.

      I set about selling and rescuing what I could. Outside of business, I desperately sought out distractions. Becca was constantly supportive. It was with her I went to see the solar eclipse. We were on a beach and it was hot and we were equipped with the appropriate filters for viewing the sun without going blind. Suddenly, a black nail pairing appeared on its side and the darkness progressively increased until the hot, bright day became cold and dark, and then abruptly there was the black orb and its radiant corona. I was rapt and exhilarated, but I was not about to stare like an ordinary, uncomplicated onlooker, which was all there was to do. I had a camera with me and I started trying to take pictures of the obliterated sun and everything about me, Becca, the eeriely still tidal lagoon, the dogs cowering under hulls, the bumpkins in muted silent bunches, everything, and as it turned out nothing much.

      Before I knew it the sun began re-emerging and the corona disappeared and the wonder was gone and I had squandered half or more the time of the eclipse trying to "live" or "capture" the experience and all I had to show for this were a few unfocused prints of shadows and what looked like a dull glow with a tail. It could have been a symbol of all my dips, and they weren't over yet!

      I kept my longing for Tessie in check through a super-human struggle which went on in my mind and in which my own self was an spectator. It was as if I were the bad judge in the Gerard David painting of his deposition and punishment. Alternatively, it was as if I had a terrible headache and I could not take an aspirin because it gave me a colic, which would have made me a prime though unhappy candidate for Christian Scientism (or is it Scientology?), any way the sect old Henry Oldman in The Mount belonged to because he didn't have brains enough to have headaches. I learned then what there was to learn about will power, as I will explain in "Gradus".

I take refuge in the former billiards room of a neo-Gothic Mansion in Nettown

When I had recovered all I could from  the shambles, which was another feat of volition I could hardly describe as heroic--heroes are supposed to do really tough things as if they were having breakfast and I felt as if some one had had me for breakfast and spat me out--I moved to London and rented the flat in Nettown I have already had occasion to mention in passing. It had been formed with the partitioned billiards room and adjoining areas of an 18th century neo-Gothic house. It was small but inexpensive and more than sufficient for my purposes. It had once been leased by a British politician who needed a local address and the Provisional IRA had put a bomb in it, but all it did was scare the wits out of my landlady because the holder of the lease was never in the premises.

      The place was ideal because I was going to do research and what I most wanted was to be alone. I didn't know exactly what I was going to research but I knew I wanted the end result to be summational. Notwithstanding the beatings I had taken, even from my own cretinous secretary, I felt that if I did something definitive for me it would also be definitive for mankind. Already here my sanity was moot, and the evidence for this would quickly accumulate, although in looking back over the ruins of my ambitions I find that they were not so outlandish.

      I outlined a work on the origins of economic inequality between nations designed to be a summation on economic development and underdevelopment. I conceived a book on Cuba and the failure of third world radicalism, which got as far as arousing interest in a publishing house owned by Ruppert Murdoch, then a much talked about Australian magnate who had set out to prove through a popular tabloid that the British had gone down in the evolutionary scale. Perhaps my most audacious stunt was to apply for a "genius grant", a yearly income awarded in Chicago to anybody in the humanities who can show cause for believing that he or she can do or not do anything very successfully in the term of one year. As to the result of this audacity, I will only say that the people who run the Genius Foundation can write the most exquisite rejection letters, comparable to one I got from an agent saying she was going to regret the rest of her life having to turn down my proposal but unfortunately she had to go on vacation to a tiny Greek island without plumbing or any form of communication to the outside world save swimming. That showed true imagination and attention to detail.

A publisher treats my summational book on world economic inequality like a hand-me-down leper's hood

I did get a letter of interest from Jaeger, a CIA front--I know this makes me sound like Sundance but these people were definitely in the category of the argumentatively anti-communist as opposed to assuming reds were hostile aliens as Reagan did--for a project of a project based on an unfinished outline meant to dissolve all possible dilemmas about history and politics. To put it very succintly, my argument, which I called "marginal choice", was that all political choices are imperfect and at some level inconsistent. As I was not keen on a book on politics and I was not sanguine about the answers to the few proposals I made, I was surprised when a year later I opened the letter and found I had a taker and I hadn't even bothered to respond. But so it goes.

      Of these early projects, the only one I completed was the one about international inequality. I used it as the dissertation for my PhD and it was brought out by a small academic publisher which went bust and its catalogue ended in the hands of Rightledge, who treated my book as if it was a leper's hand-me-down hood. The one project that did work and proved profitable and the means for survival in one of the most economically fraught periods of my life--if you can imagine worse after all my hyperbole about Gordak's mutual fund--was more accidental than a product of my prolific project-producing exertions, as I will explain.

      I was doing all I could to forget as much of my past as possible. This was an unlikely proposition and I was depressed most of the time. The domed reading room at old the British Library seemed like home for a colony of misfits. My dislike was only partly a result of my generally gloomy disposition, for it could not be said that the place was anything like the beaches I used to visit with Tessie and the contrast made me miserable. It crossed my mind that I might have been the king of the misfits, but this was like being condemned to live in a painting by Bosch, about as appealing a prospect as being a character in Dante's "Inferno". Such thoughts did nothing to improve my mood. Unfortunately, I was having them all the time.

      Sometimes I reasoned about my book projects and when I wrote out my reasons they seemed impeccable. This induced me to believe that I was always reasoning well. One day I travelled to Edinburgh and along the motorways I reasoned that Tessie had used me and the proof was in her "Alright letter"--different, you will remember, from her good "OK reaction"--which proved beyond any reasonable doubt that everything in our relationship had been planned and that when she got what she wanted she dumped me. I was forgetting it was I who had done the dumping, but that was because previously I had reasoned that because I had not really wanted to dump Tessie the letter I sent her did not mean what it said. There was impeccable reasoning for you! When I got to the ramparts of the castle, I was so indignant I shouted: "Nemo me impune lascessit!", and a tall, straight-backed visitor in a pensioner's uniform, obviously illiterate in Latin, looked at me as if I were a fakir.

      On the way back to London, I was feeling much better and when I got to my place I initiated a campaign against Tessie through defamatory letters to people I knew she would be in contact with in her work. At first I felt a surge of power, but as time went by and there were no responses I fell into an abyss of depression. Often instead of walking I crawled about my small, dark quarters shedding thick tears of rage and regret.

      According to ex post facto appraisals, it might have been about this time I crossed the line between hallucinations and madness. The moron-thesis was never conclusively demonstrated. To be frank, it was just one way I had of excusing insensitive or embarrassing behaviour on my part. My most serious failing was that I could not distinguish between regret and guilt. As I did not remember being guilty of any prosecutable offense, then I was obviously only to blame for deeds that made me feel bad or unwanted and so on, and this was not behaviour justifying the intervention of the moral conscience. As nevertheless it did not seem "normal", then I had to be a moron. But a moron did not have my intellectual reach, or I was the most brilliant moron that ever existed. I could have had my own entry in the dictionary of oddities as the moron who spent his weekends in South Bank or the Barbican and who had a British Library ticket and who corresponded with publishers and even ignored their acceptance letters. This had the implication that there were more morons in the world than any one suspected.

      The argument was flawed, except maybe in a Swiftian or Erasmian sense. What I was doing out of gratuituous spite belonged in another category altogether, and this one had to be paranoia. I did not see it then. I see it quite clearly now, but what I see is so proposterous it is also possible it might not have happened at all. All things considered, however, my opinion now is that I was at least just this side of madness, although this is not my last word on the subject because I have not yet expounded my philosophical system and I am still in the evidentiary phase of my life, so to speak.

I become involved with a woman with the insufferable habit of going on about her infatuation with James Mason

Among other things, at the time I had a lot of pent-up lust and I reasoned--honestly, I couldn't help it--that I had to get it out of my system. But I did not want another "romance". I couldn't imagine going through another process like the one with Tessie. I had a brief flirtation with another book-writer I had met at the school in which I was registered, but I stood her up through forgetfulness. Thinking back, I might have forgotten on purpose because I remember she wanted to see a play featuring Rowan Atkinson and the prospect of that gave me a panic attack. But I did not consciously arrive at a decision to snub her and I could not understand why she was so unfriendly the next time we met and why she was flirting away with a professor of oenology from the Canary Islands. I was so curious about her strange behaviour I offered to carry his briefcase, which he only ceded to me reluctantly, and I heard her telling him I was a stalker, almost a child molester, and that she was getting enough evidence on me to call in Scotland Yard.

      Instead of normal dating and the possibility of a conventional relationship, I called so-called escort services and through them I began meeting and having regular sex with prostitutes, sometimes in pairs. I particularly enjoyed a couple who usually worked together. What made them especially titillating was that they did it for the fun of it, although they still expected payment. One was statuesque and round-faced. She wasn't much to look at, but she had incredible thighs which she always sheathed in tight black pants and calf-length boots. She had the insufferable habit of going on about her infatuation for James Mason, whom she had met once, but I was aware that in the situation I was in I had to take the bad with the good.

      The other was a study in contrasts. She was petite and wore tweed skirts and used "sensible shoes", which I would like to make fun of but they were certainly more sensible than I was. This strange creature had been married to a proper Briton and her defunct husband left her a membership in a St James's street club that accepted women. It was quite an experience for me to have lunch in that place knowing what my friend did in less demure circumstances. The two girls later had a falling out--they were never fond of each other, but fondness usually has to do with having sex only insofar as you can be fond of sex--and the one with the sensible footwear would send me faked letters in which the one with the big thighs supposedly confessed she was pining for me, which was ridiculous because she and I had also had our big differences. What her former friend got out of such pranks is still beyond me, yet, considering my unmotivated letter-writing campaign against Tessie, it shouldn't have, but so is life.

      Besides research and sex with whores, I was also, as if I didn't have enough troubles, speculating in futures, about which I knew and still know next to nothing except that I would dabble in them again only if these memoirs became a world-wide best-seller and I had another even bigger best-seller to fall back on. I did know a couple of things that were as obvious as they were deceptive. I could do a routine here on how a little knowledge is dangerous, but another thing this work isn't is a moral treatise or a self-help manual.

      I knew that currencies fluctuate because I saw it in bank window displays and mainly because I had witnessed how the Costaguanan Forint had gone from near parity with the Dutch Gulden to parity with the Tibetan Yak, which is worth exactly nothing. The other thing I knew was that Pound Sterling was close to parity with the American Dollar and that was historically aberrant, but I couldn't be sure. In England if you were caught hungry driving in the shires you could starve before you found a place that would serve you food, although, in honesty, if a store run by the Patel family was open you could buy a mustard or a cucumber sandwich, which isn't saying much but it was something. I had grounds for thinking, then, that maybe that was what the Pound was worth, until I checked and saw that all other European currencies were behaving aberrantly in relation to the Dollar even though America was racking up trade deficits ten times the size of the budgets of a majority of third world countries. 

      It stood to reason that since currencies fluctuated, a big fluctuation was imminent, which I could take advantage of if I bought European currencies, and the Japanese Yen, for disposal in a near future when they would be worth much more than they were at the time I came up with my strategy. There was the nagging doubt I had about why there were fluctuations, but I had the charts in front of me and in my academic research I also had my fill of cycles through the French historian Braudel, a normally sensible if fuzzy thinker but for his infatuation with a mysterious stranger called Kondratieff, who had a theory according to which the price of rice rises when the glaciers retreat in Switzerland or something to that effect. I did not by any means believe anything other than that Kondratieff was a charlatan, the equal of any medical doctor, but I could not deny the evidence of cycles themselves and, via these, of currency fluctuations.

I fearlessly enter a field of speculation where a "technical correction" could wipe you out in one second, two if you were lucky

There were many means for taking advantage of the "knowledge" I had--I consider the future knowable in some "formal respects", like having to cut your nails some time or having yours days cut short eventually--but two were paramount: I could buy European currencies which I would use to buy financial instruments and derivatives and what not or I could buy futures contracts. Now, if you want to get rich quick, or poor even quicker, futures is the way to go, because some financiers--probably the owners of the busted Swiss bank I invested in--had devised means through which ordinary idiots could buy fractions in currency contracts they couldn't afford and make profits, or losses, as if they had bought the entire contract, which means they were disproportionate to the risk money, either way. The futures game has been compared to roulette, but this is not accurate because roulette is pure chance and if you have a good strategy in futures you might make money and if you don't the game is called Russian roulette, with six bullets instead of one in the barrel.

      Be all that as it may, I had a strategy, I was pretty much beyond caring, and ultimately making money in futures was like a challenge the world was flinging at my intelligence and that was an opportunity I wasn't going to miss. As I said, I was just this side of madness. But I wasn't wrong! My initial ventures into the futures market behind the ægis of my carefully thought out strategy were extremely successful and from the first timid dips involving a few contracts in one currency I quickly graduated to dozens and then to hundreds of contracts in all the traded currencies. The predictions about the dollar were coming as true as I had expected but for "technical corrections", which in some commodities means you can be wiped out in about a second, two if you're lucky. There was a moment during the first phase of my involvement in futures when one of these "corrections" seemed to be getting out of hand and my first encouraging gains were eroded and the losses continued and came close to wiping me out entirely. But I hung on and in a relatively short if disquieting lapse, currencies recovered their sprightliness and were bounding forward again. There was only one hazard I had not foreseen and that was my broker Buzakri.

      This man did not know a thing about currencies or about anything. His work mostly consisted in buying and selling gold for wealthy Arabs, who trusted him because he was also an Arab. Buzakri believed in moving averages. The ostensive reasoning behind this calculation was that you liquidated when you were winning and liquidated when you were losing. But the real reason was that the more you liquidated the more commissions you generated, so, in the end, I had to acknowledge that Buzakri, like my cousin Marius, was not as stupid as he appeared. But I am getting ahead of myself.

      I did not for one moment believe that moving averages were anything other than numerological mumbo-jumbo akin to Kondratieff cycles and I only indulged Buzakri in his idiocy because I was not inclined to be doing financial analysis twenty four hours a day. I should have put a damper on the whole idea from the start, but I was dipping here also, which means I was willing to try anything once. At first however I stuck with my theory and in effect money started rolling in. It was pleasant to know I was right. The profits were a matter of indifference.

      They did allow me to travel, which I did frequently, alone or accompanied by one of my whores, but always in style. I did Spain various times and I wrote an essay on Spanish Church Gothic. My argument was that the Spaniards had adopted Gothic as a foreign style, whose use was further hampered by relative lack of resources. I propounded my argument to a Spanish "expert" who told me: "Gothic is Gothic". Then I sent my essay to Courtaulds where it was sent to an English specialist who wrote back that there was an early Gothic arch in Avila--I checked and there it was (I also found one in Angkor Wat later)--and that Spanish kings were rich. I later discovered the Spanish "expert" had been a teacher of the English specialist. I travelled all over Europe and further afield: Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, India. My travels were cultural, but I occasionally had to indulge my companions' love of beaches and dancing spots resulting in some regrettable misses, so I finally opted for travelling alone, which made me long again for Tessie. The whores had not driven her from my mind and she haunted me in India all the way but especially in Mumtaz's tomb. India proved to be more rewarding than I expected, in various ways, as I shall explain.

My strategy pans out and one night I realize in a drunken stupor I had become a zillionaire

On my return from my first trip there I had reasons to celebrate. I have never believed in drowning one's sorrows, because sorrows have a way of drowning one afterwards. My drinking had gone down appreciably. But that night I decided to make an exception. Lying on my bed, drinking from a tumbler on top of my ribcage, I asked myself whether it couldn't be that I was dreaming. This would have complicated matters further to the neurotic, moron, and/or madman possibilities. But it was in line with the "life is a dream" motif, which I had studied in depth in the Calderon play of the same name. However, this time I was not thinking seriously. I was like a computer on its day off. I was reasoning for the heck of it. To say I am dreaming, I thought, would be a lie, because even though I won't be doing it for long, I know I am in bed by myself getting slowly but inexorably pickled. I am who I am and no one but and I can pinch my arm and feel it to prove I am who I say I am and I know it is I who is downing these whiskies and it is I who in a while will not be thinking it is I who is drinking, or any one else doing anything else for that matter. Withal, I drawled histrionically, I am not what I seem to be and since seeming is the better part of being it is simply not possible that I should be what I am or to seem what I am not. I am transformed, I guffawed out loud, but when I tried to get up I fell back and remained still incapable of moving or thinking until I lost consciousness. I was celebrating that I was on my way to becoming a multimillionaire.

      Next day there was no hangover but I remembered the computer analogy and I thought to myself that it was wrong on a crucial point, which was that computers might not have the notion of I. This pointed directly to the specific self, a concept which I would later make the centerpiece of my philosophical analysis. But during the time I was very rich I did not think much on this subject. I did not need to. I was putting my past behind me and I could spend nights calculating how I had enough money to live in luxury even if I lived to be a hundred and fifty and did not make another penny in my life. This didn't produce any deep satisfaction, but it didn't produce any worries either. I was finally in a state of equilibrium or somewhere near it. But I still had the problem of how to kill time, which is where India came in again.

      On a trip there, I chanced to read Coedès and discovered the ancient civilizations of South East Asia. As I was doing nothing in particular I decided to do a lot of travelling in that region. I chose Manila as a base and signed a short lease for a small apartment with a terrific view that embraced Cavite, Corregidor, and Bataan. With some difficulty I travelled to Siem Reap, where one could hear the sound of landmines going off day and night. There were few tourists around. Fortunately, they had cleared a path to the Bayon and when I got there I stood transfixed by the absolutely and magnificently paradoxical and even absurd. It was unthinkable but for the fact that it existed, and this suggested that my idea about the possible unreality of my own life was plausible.

      Here was a place which a Buddhist king had built with hundreds of sculptures of his own face, each one subtly different from the others and all of them bigger than a man. "Place" was the right word for the Bayon, which was neither a building nor a proper monument, not even a temple, for the profusion of stone faces, which began at the huge gates to the area where the Bayon had been erected, overwhelmed any worshipful purpose, unless the purpose was precisely to worship the author of this work, king Jayavarman VII. The alternative explanation was a stone equivalent of a personal photo album, but the Bayon left no room for entertaining such frivolities. It wasn't what you might consider a beautiful structure--from a distance it looked like a grey, mossy jumble of stones--but it was original, very likely the most original architectural work in history.

      As a spectacular bonus it was surrounded at its base by large carved stone panels that told many stories from the reign of Jayavarman--especially those of his war against Champa, in which he was getting even for the sack of Angkor--and included countless details of the everyday life of his subjects. It was as if the swell-headed monarch wanted to embrace everything in his world from the most pedestrian to the most exalted.

      I also managed to reach Bagan and saw so many pagodas my head began to feel like a chess pawn. But this too was a magnificent experience. Here as well there were few tourists--getting there cost me a small fortune--and I felt as if I was a visitor to a world outside of time, another bit of evidence for unreality, although I moved about in a very real if ancient Land Rover and I sweated as if I was back in the desert in Costaguana. But that desert too seemed imaginary then.

      In between my trips in South East Asia I went back to Nettown and checked that my future contracts were functioning properly. I had lunch with Buzakri and he assured me that everything was in his capable hands. Despite my disillusionment with leftism, I was very pro-Labour and I made contributions to the party large enough to get me an interview with Neil Kinnock, in which I instructed him that Lawson was not be lionized by the left just because he had suddenly discovered that Margaret Thatcher was too bossy and used dowdy handbags. He wasn't, but that was because the flurry over his resignation did not last very long.

From a distance, Borobudur looked like a birthday cake for Methuselah

On one of my voyages to Asia I did a round-the-world trip, which in first class can be exquisitely expensive, but it can also be the source of utter content. I mean, this was a time when I felt as if I was at the very center of creation with no material worries to disturb me and nothing too unpleasant inside me, such as gut-wrenching envy or blinding, implacable hatreds. But was I happy? That is another question. I suppose I was when they offered me Dom Perigon milesimé as soon as I occupied my seat in the front of airplanes and I certainly must have been visiting the Bayon and raising dust along the trails in Bagan. But in Sydney, dining near the ocean by myself, I felt miserable. And if I stopped distracting my mind with this or that, it tended to go into these runaway riffs that ended up in melancholy and insecurity.

      I hadn't been sleeping too well and I had succumbed to the pill-taking habit, luckily, unlike my father, with Swiss tranquilizers, which lowered levels of anxiety from the urge to jump out of high windows to more reasonable magnitudes. On the effects of these medicaments, the evidence was inconclusive. A bureaucrat somewhere had tried to commit suicide by swalling ten boxes of them and he survived after sleeping for a week. This was good. But there was also the guy from Leeds who in an interview with Terry Wogan said that he had lost eveything because of his addiction to Librium. Apparently it made him so carefree and mellow he started giving away his belongings, including a house in Hampstead he signed over to his wife. During the hour or so the program lasted, the poor fellow kept interjecting: "I did, I did". I didn't believe him, although I couldn't understand why anybody would want publicity as an out-and-out idiot.

      I made a trip back to The Republic, where I wanted to do a bit of showing off, but the striking, young blonde whore I was laying, whom I wanted to escort around, was a no-show--her Jamaican pimp put his foot down--and the trip only made me feel desolate, although Paresia was kind enough to invite me to dinner in his hill-top mansion, which was when he did the ironizing about Veritas. By the end of that night, I began to feel a bit wasted. I decided I would never return to The Republic and I felt thankful for the independence my new-found wealth gave me.

      I was also beginning to get fed up with the Tropics, but I wasn't done yet with my travels in South East Asia. I spent a considerable time in Yogjakarta, from where I visited many different sites in the region. Naturally, Borobudur was the main attraction for me. From a distance it looks like a large yellow cake with enough candles to celebrate a birthday of Methuselah. Upon closer inspection it is a wholly different proposition. The wonder lies in details like the different styles and scenes in the friezes at the successive levels of the structure--roughly, they went upwards from the accessibly narrative and illustrative to the utterly and imprenetrably symbolic--or the sitting stone Buddhas with different hand gestures inside bell-like, latticed stone cages, as if their creators did not want them to get sunburned. This was something Koreans, who wear long sleeves and two gloves when playing golf, understand intuitively, but it is more likely the cages were meant to suggest that after doing all the levels of Borodbudur the pilgrim could only obtain glimpses of the perfection of the Buddha. In Thailand there were so many Buddhas I thought I could see them in the chao kao. but in Borobudur they rekindled my interest in Buddhism and in its specifically Tantric form. Even though it has no interiors, unlike, for instance, Angkor Wat, which has the feel of a huge termite mound (albeit built by very talented termites), Borobudur is comparable to a cathedral in the insistent upwards trending of its design and of its motifs, the latter being both mystical and decorative.

      One of the "mysteries" of Borobudur--it is an universal belief that tourists are in an eternal search for mystification, which is like saying that they want to increase their ignorance--is to be found at the base of the monument, where the longest extension of bas-reliefs was covered all around by its builders with huge, perfectly chiseled blocks of sandstone. This has provided much food for thought. The Japanese, during their occupation of Java in World War II, uncovered part of the base and it is known that the carvings contrast scenes of homely virtues with scenes of gluttony, lust, mayhem, and so on, and in a lower register represent an after-life where the virtuous are rewarded and the vicious tortured in hellish places. Probably for the benefit of tourists in their quest for doubt and ignorance, it has been speculated that the creators of Borobudur covered all this so that the pious could concentrate on the upper friezes and their gradual steps towards perfection. It is more likely the carved base was covered to prevent the structure from sagging, which is what was happening anyway to an alarming degree when the Dutch decided to restore it.

      In the Yogjakarta area I also visited the restoration works at Prambanan and further afield I climbed to the calderas of gigantic volcanoes. I most decidedly avoided Bali, where I knew that visitors were kidnapped on arrival and taken through elaborate rituals in which they were forced to worship, and frequently buy, wooden idols and to eat in very expensive places. The expense of course was no object. It was the regimentation I feared.

It never crossed my mind then that Melvyn Douglas might have been Jewish, an opinion I changed when, later in his career, he certainly looked like a wizened old Jew

My expenses were more than amply covered for a long time after I was done with my South East Asian sojourn and returned to London. But things were going on of which I was not aware. I liked having a lot of money and self-evidently, as I had not quit speculating in futures, I wanted more and more of it. That this did not make sense when yuxtaposed to my repetitious calculations about how much my money would last--I calculated my income at every year of my future life until I was one hundred--should have been an indication that my reasoning was not consistently on track. Like the guy in Wogan's program, I too began to give money away. Even though what had got me on the warpath against Tessie was my suspicion that she had deliberately bilked me, as soon as I could I sent her enough money to buy an apartment, much more than I had originally given her. This provided her with the opportunity to do it again, because she first made sure the money was in her account and then she didn't even write to thank me. At least her "Alright letter", which had been the cause of so much personal indignation, had expressed some gratitude.

      This turn of events made me feel as thought somehow my life was useless. I had a lot of money but it wasn't even in my power to make amends. It occurred to me that I was behaving exactly like my father, for whom the best expression of love was to lavish money. Sadly, it was this that had made my mother so grateful. I wondered in how many other ways I might have been fooling myself and that's when my old attachment to philosophy came back to me, and with it the memory of Lighting Bolt Night.

      It wasn't that I had ever lost it, but I had undoubtedly gone astray and I had been forgetful. It was a classic case of "out of sight out of mind" and now mind was crying out for something to explain it to itself. I discarded the usual nostrums, such as Freudanism, that came up when I made half-hearted stabs at explanations. Heidegger and Sartre were at least challenging if ultimately preposterous. Perhaps, I thought, there is in philosophy more about mind than I am aware of? It was impossible that philosophy of mind could have stopped with Descartes' astonishment at the fact that he could think, which meant roughly that he was actually thinking. Since this argument was unassailable, it stood to reason that it must have been the groundwork for a lot of subsequent thought I had neglected or ignored.

      I reached into the sack of memory to see what I could find and surprisingly I came up with many names through which I derived related ideas and arguments. As I have always been the foxy type who sniffs around a lot, as opposed to the hedgehog who knows with great certainty that he lives in a hole (a truth a fox would never begrudge or envy in him), I soon made three categories, which I expressed in a diagram consisting of three chronological lines vaguely originating in Classical Greece (as my enquiry was not strictly speaking historical I could leave the specifics of this issue up in the air). Two of these lines, psychology and medical psychology, were pretty barren until the 19th cent.

      As a concession to my superficial delvings into Eastern thinking I broke the emptiness in the psychology line with a note that read "Western Psychology". It went against the grain of my thought. I have always tended towards the unitary and in particular I have always posited the unity of mankind and always rejected racism and anything that smacks of prejudice. My rejection was visceral, possibly an attitude I had to assume given my origins, and it was as pure as driven snow. This ambiguous metaphor--driven snow to my mind is slush, which looks like a melted mud ice cream--was deliberately chosen to illustrate how racism sneaks into thinking and language with treacherous ease. However, my categorizing psychology as "Western" was not racist but merely a footnote to imply I had not explored enough non-Western theories on mind.

      Concerning my enlightened hatred of prejudices, I always thought that Jews if any group had to be anti-racist, but I began having suspicions and doubts, which were confirmed the day I read in an American scientific monthly that it was a fact that Jews were a race because of the physical resemblance between Sephardim and Askenazim. The evidence the Jewish author gave was his own unshakeable certitude about having observed such similarities. Admittedly, I read this in a pop-scientific magazine and pop-science is premised on good intentions, which could excuse teaching the Earth is flat because the teacher was just filling a lack of knowledge. But the mentality here was the thing. My own belief is that even the word "group" as I used it above in reference to Jews is wrong, because Jews are not a race but a microcosm of humanity. The only doubts I have entertained about this belief were based on my first viewing of Ninotchka. It never crossed my mind then that Melvyn Douglas might have been Jewish, an opinion I changed when, later in his career, he certainly looked like a wizened old Jew. The strength of this argument was equipollent to that of the cited Jewish pop-scientist and his amazing ability for instantaneous nose-measuring. Noses as criterion, incidentally, would have made Neanderthals the ancestors of Jews and every one knows Crichton's best-selling description of Neanderthals as red-eyed cannibals with a terrible odour problem, which would make him the biggest best-selling anti-semite in the history of publishing.  

      My low opinion of some African countries had nothing to do with racism. I was then past caring about social phenomena. It had been a long time since I had hit upon the combination environment-and-culture to explain economic backwardness and I was stuck in it and I wasn't about to do any revising. When I had made much more progress in my philosophical investigations, I found reasons to question the advisability of attributing mental particularities to cultures or civilizations whatever their avowed causes, but at the time I started I wasn't going to be niggling about such details. It was my life that was at stake here, so a minor error here or a slight exaggeration there wasn't going to weigh much at the end, and as it turned out, when I had occasion of considering logic in detail, I realized once again, and definitely, that mankind is one and that it is disagregated by premises. But I disgregate.

Leibniz's monadology suggested to me a football hooligan bashing himself

Getting back to my chronological diagram, during the 19th century medical psychology branched into psychiatry, clinical psychology, and Freudianism. These were interconnected, particularly psychiatry and clinical psychology. Psychology itself developed into experimental psychology from which originally behaviorism emerged. The third chronological line in my diagram was philosophical psychology, and this was definitely not barren before the 19th century. From its vague Ancient Greek origins, it led to Descartes, and he was the starting point for a complicated diagram, which could be described as a tree except that it was fallen and it was missing a lot of foliage. This was obvious because, as in the case of the other lines, I could draw it as far as the 19th century, but there the tree looked as if it had been chopped up for firewood, which couldn't be right. In this outline, I was presuming something, though nothing as complex as the existence of Uranus, and my presumption was based on the premise that thought is part of history and history is continuous and never conclusive. I eventually concluded that it is messy, though hardly as hopeless as Veritas' linguini factory.

From Descartes, lines led to Leibniz and British empiricism. I knew there were antecessor-to-successor relations here because Descartes' cogito argument linking reality and awareness was the basis for a lot of theorizing on whether there really existed something outside of thought. In other words, Descartes was the originator of what is called dualism, a sharp demarcation in being between mind and world, and his trouvaille, which on the surface seems as epochal as breakfast cereal, was found by other thinkers to be not only legitimate but profoundly and lastingly stimulating as well.

      In going about re-inserting myself into philosophy in a systematic historical way, many ideas were coming back to me and were becoming part of the diagram I was tracing as I went along. There was something called monadology, a doctrine about the universe being divided into units--obviously called monads and associated in my mind for purely phonetic reasons with gonads--independent of one another but coordinated by God into orderly, interactive activity, which sounds circular but is perfectly in the spirit of things. Roughly, according to the inventor of monadology, the German jack of all trades G.W. von Leibniz, the universe was like the eye of a fly. Alternatively, it was as if God relaxed in a kitchen and, after creating the universe, He had chopped it into tiny bits. It was also possible to imagine that he had created the tiny bits instead of the universe. These unlikely scenarios about something that might not even have taken place could only be grasped in the context of the problem of dualism. It occurred to me that if Leibniz had not been a great mathematician, his philosophical speculations might have been taken for babble.

      I have observed in life that having a set of unlikely, not to say stupid, ideas is no obstacle to having brilliant ones also, and Leibniz is an excellent example. This became evident to me when I came across his tentative discovery that cognition is subconscious and his unequivocal principle of the indiscernibility of identicals. The latter, which is the basis of logic and seems as obvious as Descartes's cogito, expresses the old apothegm that if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and sounds like a duck it has to be duck, also known as the principle (though by no means the relation) of identity. I chose to call it, sensibly enough, the Duck Principle. Leibniz, in sum, despite his dualism-bashing monadology, which to me suggests a football hooligan bashing himself, was one of the greatest thinkers that ever lived. Even his best-of-all-possible-worlds argument about history is irrefutably consensual--every one tacitly accepts it and so it must be valid--and Leibniz reputation as an airhead is due entirely to Voltaire, the champion lightweight of all times, saving perhaps Samuel Johnson, and that because Johnson made a jackass of himself thinking he was making a jackass of bishop Berkeley.

Berkeley took empiricism so much to heart he muddled hopelessly the problem of erections

The fundamental problem posed by dualism can be easily summarized. We know thought but we cannot point to it like we can point to things such as a chair or an erection. The only ostensive object related to thought is the brain and the brain is just matter. Now, matter is incapable of thought--although, as in an erection, it can reflect thought--so how can there be thought? What's more, how can thought encompass an erection? And even if it could conceivably encompass an erection, how can we be sure that we are having an erection? So, you see, dualism as a problem does not really exist, but it can be made to exist on strong philosophical grounds.

      Descartes laid the foundations for its existence and others, like Leibniz and the British Empiricists--but also many others, including the solipsist Geulincx, better known as Samuel Beckett's maître à penser--carried on. British Empiricism began with Locke, who coined the phrase tabula rasa. This sounds like an Arab dish but it refers to the theory that the mind is a blank at birth and is filled by experience, hence empiricism. Berkeley took this to heart, perhaps beyond the call of duty, because he could not explain how the external world could make an impression on mind--apparently he never had erections--so he said that mind was all that existed and its apparently reliable representation of reality was the work of God. His doctrine is known as idealism, which, odd though it may sound, is a version of empiricism. Platonism, on the other hand, which is about ideas, is not idealism but a form of realism, because Plato believed that ideas were as real as erections, of which, incidentally, he strenously disapproved. Johnson's faux pas was that he hit the floor with his cane and exclaimed: "By God, that's how I refute Berkeley!" Philosophers took this as a personal threat and the anecdote, remitted by Boswell, who was non-committal, can be used as a battle-cry for both believers and doubters. The consensus seems to be that Johnson was overdoing it, perhaps because most people don't understand why exactly he was banging the floor.

      Hume, of whom, you will recall, as a student of Duplex I had heard a great deal, explored another facet of empiricist scepticism: roughly, that stimulation and erection are related sequentially and not causally. Put another way, an erection follows upon a stimulation, but is not caused by it in a strict sense. This, it would seem, would take some explaining, but if Duplex awed sophomores at Kings with his demonstration that he was not demonstrating anything, why couldn't he, or Hume before him, have been able to show that one could have a gratuitous erection? Or, for that matter, that all erections were gratuitous?

      Hume's scepticism did not cut any ice with Kant, who wanted to place philosophical thought on a secure foundation and in particular was not having his erections argument. Kant distinguished between empirical statements and those statements that were true and entailed necessarily true statements. The latter were analytical propositions. A classical linguistic example of this was that if you were my father's brother's son or daughter you had to be my first cousin. A simpler example was "married" and its opposite as obtained by adding "un", as in "un-married". As these propositions presumed a great deal of experience, their analytical qualifications were moot, which is why some philosophers thought of them as merely conventional. However, as far as Kant was concerned, the object of philosophy was to find out whether empirical propositions could be made as reliable as analytical propositions. But he must have known he was going around in circles because in order to obtain analytical propositions you first had to posit empirical propositions, and this defeated the purpose of the exercise.

      What you must remember in reading philosophers is that they tend to get carried away by their arguments and when they come up with some absurd consequence in their reasoning they prefer to label it "Big Philosophical Issue" (BPI) rather than go back and start anew. Perhaps because they fear they will never get started again. Be that as it may, no one really believed that Kant advanced any further than making the empirical/analytical distinction, and in fact, as I later learned, the distinction itself was questioned even by those who sympathized with Kant's goal and were willing to disregard that he was doing like a carousel. He did have some ingenious arguments about why causality was an universally valid proposition, and as between erections being gratuituous or being stimulated, most everyone would have agreed that Hume was wrong and Kant was right.

Suppose, for the sake of illustration, the thesis was "good", then the antithesis was "bad", and the synthesis had to be "so-so"

Beyond British Empiricists and Kant, my knowledge of the history of philosophy tended to get a bit disperse. There were great men and there were schools. German idealism was a school. Hegel was a great man broadly within that school. He argued that the Prussian State was the be-all and end-all of civilization (long before the invention of the internet). It was from Hegel that Marx adopted the belief in a be-all and end-all of history, which in his own words, he "turned on its head" and invented "dialectical materialism". The key word for both thinkers was dialectics, the doctrine that either thought determines history or history determines thought according to a pattern involving a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis.

      Suppose, for the sake of illustration, the thesis was "good", then the antithesis was "bad", and the synthesis had to be "so-so", as in: "You're son is behaving so-so in school". There were many other possible examples. "Beautiful" contrasted with "ugly" and the synthesis of the two was also "so-so". In the animal kingdom dialectics functioned much better as in "lion" and "eagle" which produced "griffin", an ugly Welsh animal believed to be extinct. Regardless of what Hegel and Marx believed the method was not perfect, especially because the synthesis could be anything and this favoured arbitrariness, a quality which makes for a distinctly threatening universe, like running into a griffin at night or jumping a puddle and ending up in the moon. Hegel was very obscure. His commentators are perforce even more obscure than he was.

      I tried to read Schopenhauer, a great man outside the schools, and found him daunting. As I already knew he hated women and was a pessimist, I figured the effort was not worth the candle. It sounded too much as if I had written a long, difficult treatise on quacks, forcibly pessimistic, but not as if I honestly believed I was going to discredit medicine or stop taking tranquilizers. 

      Utilitarianism was a school founded either by Bentham, whose corpse, you'll remember, Scanlon for some reason took pains to show me, or John Stuart Mill, probably Mill, for it was he who formulated the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, which suffers from an overload of premises. And as to Bentham, what I have concluded after letting the memory slosh around in my mind for a long time is that Scanlon who was very leftist probably worshipped mummies. If this is the case, he must have been sorely disappointed when I told him what he could do with his leftism, another reason he never answered my last petulant e-mail.

      I knew that Utilitarianism, which was a child of Empiricism, had re-incarnated in America as Pragmatism. The local roots of Pragmatism could be traced to Emerson, the leader of Thoreau, who wrote a lively work about a winter he spent camping near a cold, stagnant pond crawling with crayfish. This thought made me pessimistic. But Pragmatism was not pessimistic. It wasn't however what I was looking for. William James, who went to the essence of Pragmatism, had argued that any belief was valid if it made you happy. He himself found religious experiences uninspiring. But how far could I travel with those ideas in my case?

      I still had the alternatives to neurosis of madness or idiocy and none of these made me happy. Life was too real for me to try to shrug it off. Philosophy was another matter. It always seemed to start, to climax, or to end in nihilism, in all but the very shallow like Helvetius or Comte. I was acquainted with nihilism from my readings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. But nihilism went far back in time. Socrates, for example, was such an idol-basher he was condemned to death by his fellow Athenians, who did not appreciate being told they were superstitious hypocrites. Even Kant, who was to philosophy what Beethoven was to music, had written many more refutations than demonstrations and his treatise on ethics ends with the admission that he cannot really give reasons why people should behave morally rather than immorally.

Both Brentano and Husserl were worried by the widespread habit of people for making outlandish claims such as "I am hungry" or "My leg itches" 

Despite these difficulties, I was intuitively inclined to philosophical thought, but for starters I had my psychological problems and my interest was in philosophical psychology, and not just of the Cartesian variety, which all it did was tell me what I knew only too well: that I was thinking a lot but not getting anywhere fast. I recollected that Franz von Brentano had gained some fame with the concept of intentionality. This has nothing to do with what the word intention normally connotes. In Brentano, it refers to the ability of mind to find meaning in its contents. This is not as stupid as it sounds.

      Why, for example, should an aggregate of sensations in the mind constitute a meaningful whole such as "chair"? Brentano did not give a noteworthy answer, but he raised the issue, which entails that mind is characteristically meaningful and that its meaning-giving function is a relation between intentionality and mental contents. Gestalt psychology, for instance, proposed the theory that images entered mind complete in themselves, which is as if a particle physicist insisted that atoms were irreducible. Mind was about things. The BPI Brentano could not solve was how intentionality could confer reality on fictions. This was like asking how people are capable of believing they are more clever or more handsome than it is reasonably justified. Any fool knows this as vanity. Since it is self-love that underlies both vanity and BPIs, if Brentano could not recognize vanity when he saw it, he wasn't about to do any recanting or revising of his ideas on psychology.

      I am not saying that Brentano was not useful to me or that his thought was useless in general. His emphasis on meaningfulness was a first-order proposition, the equivalent of an axiom if one wanted to make sense of mind. Husserl, who next to Brentano, in philosophical circles, is like Superman compared to the Green Hornet (except when there is some Cryptonite around), nevertheless accepted Brentano's bewilderment as genuine and not just an intellectual pose, which it probably was, not unlike Descartes suspect doubts about what happened under his nose, or about his nose itself (not to mention erections, which I do not want to overdo in my efforts to be both ironical and didactic).

      Husserl wrote voluminously and cryptically. As in the case of Hegel, his commentators are as cryptic as he is, but along general lines he claimed he had solved Brentano's dilemma by giving intentionality a different name (noesis) and by giving its objects a new name (noemata). Therefore, the problem that so exercised Brentano was obviously that he had not invented a name for the contents of mind. Husserl wrote in German and German is a language hospitable to wordplay and neologisms. Essentially what troubled both Brentano and Husserl was the widespread penchant of people for making outlandish claims such as "I am hungry" or "my leg itches" as if they were facts. This showed awareness and awareness was not reliable.

      Husserl gave the name of "phenomenology"--not to be confused with phrenology which had been in vogue earlier and also has to do with the general area of the head--to the complex set of concepts and arguments he developed to do away with the problems of awareness. No one in his senses believed that Husserl had solved anything or done anything but write some very long books, bar a Costaguanan Husserlian philosopher who was made Lord of Knowledge in his country, although it has been pointed out that there is no word in Costaguanan for "senses". Nevertheless, Husserl was considered a philosopher's philosopher because he claimed that only those trained in phenomenology could read the mind and its contents. Even though as far as is known phenomenology was only used by Husserl (and the Costaguanan Lord of Knowledge), his claim was interpreted in a wide sense, by philosophers naturally, as meaning that only philosophers were capable of dealing with awareness, which implied that people didn't know when they were hungry or when their legs itched. 

      I wasn't having any of this, because I was by nature sceptical about the knowledge others might have about my states of mind. But I also had to admit that, just as Brentano had pointed out the intentionality, that is, the aboutness or meaningfulness of mind, so it was conceivable that I could find ideas in other philosophers which could help me pick my way through the maze of my mind and its twists and turns. Even if those philosophers I had some acquaintance with did not seem to offer solutions to my personal dilemmas, it was possible that others I knew little or nothing about could be of assistance. In sum, I believed that where there is heavy rumbling an electric storm could follow. Most tellingly, my knowledge of the evolution of philosophical thought tended to peter out at the beginning of the 20th century and I was sure that philosophical thought on mind did not stop there, if only because of having read Heidegger and Sartre extensively. I knew other names and I had a vague knowledge of certain themes, but this was hardly sufficient for what I needed to do myself some good.

      I had reached that point in my meditations when, amazingly, I read about a forthcoming Congress of Philosophy of Mind, announced as virtually the blockbuster of the century, to be held in a place called Clearwater, in California. I didn't read anywhere that I qualified for participating, but I as was registered in the University of London and I had money and time on my hands, instead of traveling about for its own sake I thought I could do much worse than go to this Congress armed with some elementary credentials and a huge thirst for knowledge, and more than for knowledge, for perhaps the means to put a leash on my mind like what they did to me at the time I was engaging in my childish but fool-proof attempts at felodese (not to be confused with fellatio which I have never attempted except a few times to myself, when I was much leaner than I am now). 

Any period of any one's past, with a little connivance on any one's part, can seem like a soup, exception made of surfeits of joy or misery

Before leaving I did a superficial inventory of my assets and after being lied to once again by Buzakri I left London a very rich man without a material care in the world. Little did I suspect how diminished I would be upon my return.

      I had proof of my registry as a post-grad, which I made sure did not specify I was not doing philosophy and, when I got to Clearwater, I had no difficulty in obtaining permission to attend the forthcoming proceedings, especially in that, as far as I could tell, no one was being excluded and the message to the world was: "Come one come all", maybe even broader, like distributing flyers and pulling people in from the street. This was in part because Clearwater, although richly endowed, was a new college with as yet little prestige, which was the reason the congress was organized in the first place. The Clearwater College of Arts and Sciences, to give it its full official name, had managed to net some philosophical luminaries for its staff if only part time. The Congress had going for it that a lot of philosophical "research" was being done in older academic centers in the vicinity. But the setting was the clincher for those who had accepted the invitation. Clearwater had been built on a shelf of land between a snow-capped sierra and a rumbustious sea. The subtropical greenness came from wells, which made the place an oasis, for the climate was dry and temperate, "luminous and cool in winter, breezy and cool summers", as the brochure put it. For my part, I chose five-star accomodations in Carmel and I rented a car in which I drove to the Clearwater Congress each day, where I attended every important conference and seminar.

      You might consider that I must have been feeling tiptop and you would be wrong. I was alone and desperate--it never crossed my mind to invite a whore to such an august event--and I was not in the mood for crashing circles, even if I had been invited to the social events at the congress, and I wasn't. Another observation I have made in life is that mind is resourceful and it usually makes the best of bad situations. My moods, in other words, did not hamper my curiosity or my ability to grasp complex issues and debates, and as any period of any one's past, with a little connivance on any one's part, can seem like a soup, exception made of surfeits of joy or misery, I cannot now, as I write this, deny that my days at the Clearwater Congress were not good. The least that can be said is that they were rewarding.

      I do not intend to bore the reader with detailed descriptions of everything that went on there. I will instead try to be as synoptical as possible, meaning by this not just about what transpired but particularly on what I culled for my own purposes, which laid the foundations for the next part of my memoirs and only in places does not strictly follow the mainstream of contemporary philosophy of mind.

      Let me first explain that this was a congress for believers in what is known as analytical philosophy, a designation that went back to Kant's concept of analytical propositions. This was the inspiration for philosophers who thought of themselves as being very scientific. I am sure they would not have objected to being described as cosmologists who couldn't concentrate on the origins of the universe because they kept getting distracted by their own thought processes. This narcissistic habit resulted in their interest in mind-independent logic, but inevitably also in mind itself, which was precisely what they wanted to avoid.   Analytical philosophy was not so much a school as an attitude or, even if the expression might seem inappropriate, a state of mind. The inappropriateness however is perspectival, for of two of the greatest philosophers affiliated to analyticity, one, Wittgenstein, believed that logic is tautological--rather as if a particle physicist were to say that an "atom is an atom is an atom, give me a break!"--and the other, Quine, argued emphatically that analytical propositions did not exist, not because they were ultimately empirical but because of some incomprehensible grudge he had against synonyms. Quine accumulated much prestige as one of the few practitioners skilled in the art of writing books in wffs (pronounced woofs), a metalanguage I had only come across before in Indian ethicists. A metalanguage, incidentally, is a language about a language, which means it must be translated twice before it is comprehensible. Unlike pop-science which tries to make linguistic sense out of equations, Quine and his fellow wffs-writers tried to make equations out of what was probably nonsense if baldly stated.

Behaviorists, in sum, denied mind, which of course made them mindless, about which they felt all chuffed up

Despite these inconsistencies, and many others I will not cite so as not to grate on Dear Reader, analytical philosophers seemed to be of one mind on the subject of mind. To be more precise, there were two phases in analytical philosophy of mind: in the first it ignored or denied mind--although denial of mind in Wittgensteinian terms was still about mind--and in the second it tried to come to terms with mind either through the computer metaphor or with the claim that neurology has all the answers.

      The original denier of mind was the 19th century German logician and thinker Frege, who implicitly believed that all philosophy before him was tainted by psychology. You have to have quite an ego to think that you can do better than that considering that without mind there wouldn't even be philosophy. The contemporary English philosopher Dummett tried to explain Frege's objective as the "extrusion of thought". This was deemed very clever in certain circles. But reflect a little. What the phrase says is that if you want to think as objectively and logically as possible all you have to do is take your ideas out of your head, which is about as likely a story as waking up one morning and discovering that colours were changed because a mad scientist had operated your brain without your knowledge. If you believed any such thing, as opposed to merely saying that some one else believed it, you were probably barmy or were using the wrong dictionary.

      Apparently what Frege did believe in was a metalanguage for expressing yourself such that there was no way you could make stupid errors, which is another likely story and the one that Bertrand Russell, the founding father of British analytical philosophy, squashed with the ingenious argument that self-reference is inherently paradoxical because it splits the principle of identity. Now, splitting the atom is a complicated operation which can lead to a lot of chaotic destruction, but splitting the principle of identity, the one I dubbed the Duck Principle, is impossible in the ordinary world, where you cannot fit, say, a tree and a flagpost into exactly the same space, or a day and a night into a day or a night. 

      Frege had invented a system in which it was possible to say something like: "I am this or I am that", and this implied that the "I" making the statement was not itself. If you have trouble understanding this, try saying of yourself that you are a foul-smelling, hungry pig without explaining that you had spent a week lost in a rain forest without food. Russell's critique floored Frege who could not invoke the BPI clause and had to admit that his life's work was ruined. He didn't, however, go the sad way of Turing, who, after having built a reputation with the demonstration that a machine could do every mental operation, went and demonstrated that he could do what no machine would even remotely consider, which was to self-destruct, mutatis mutandi, because it had tried to access a protected file.

      Despite his put down of Frege, Russell was left with his own BPI: the unsolved problem of thought being unreliable yet having to go on thinking. Russell's scepticism about mind originated in his intentionality paradoxes such as that because husband x did not know that his wife y was the woman having an affair with man z, he did not know his own wife. This might have been true in a figurative sense, but Russell used the propositions in a literal sense, which of course made them nonsensical yet supposedly something that could happen in real life (to an idiot maybe, but I, who suspected I could be one, wouldn't have fallen for such sophistry!). Since he could not deny the existence of mind--Russell in the balance was largely commonsensical--he consigned its contents to the category of "propositional attitudes". This was very helpful to me because it suggested the possibility that the contents of mind could be propositions and I later put this concept to great use during the redemption phase of my life.

      Now, Russell's admission of fallibility was something all mortals know, but the way he presented it sounded unique and it impressed a lot of people. It didn't impress Wittgenstein at all. He thought that Russell was what is normally considered a fool for believing that, one, logic led anywhere but in circles, and two, that philosophy was a science. The curious thing is that Russell was as impressed by Wittgenstein as others had been taken with him. Even so, Wittgenstein's solution--or non-solution, depending on your viewpoint--to the problem of mind--or awareness, also depending on your definition--was so inadequate, and he was so importunate about it, that eventually even Russell got his fill of him.

      What Wittgenstein affirmed was that mind was reducible to language. In order to do this however he had to make the absurd claim that thinking that "I am hungry" or that "my left leg itches" involves a private language. Then he proceeded to refute the possibility of a private language, which wasn't that difficult considering the easy target he put himself. In fact, he was demanding of any one who claimed to be hungry or to feel an itch to prove that these thoughts were expressed in a language, complete with vocabulary and grammar, no one else knew about, and that was a hell of a lot to demand of some one who only wanted to eat or scratch a leg. It was as if I asked you for a match to light a cigarette and you ordered me to beg and crawl first, which is a reaction conceivable in a fanatical non-smoker but hardly befitting a fair-minded philosopher. I thought the "linguistic turn", as Wittgenstein's thesis is often called, was a dead end. Language was a means and not an end in itself. It wasn't the end of mind or the end of logic or of anything. And language as its own end was a serpent swallowing its tail. More likely a dog barking up its own arse.

      Make of this what you will. I am only remitting what I heard at the epoch-making Clearwater Congress of Philosophy of Mind--despite its sucess, it is still debated whether the designation is apt or misleading--mainly because it had a lot to do with the future course of my life and many indeed were the important things I learned in the philosophically pregnant week I spent closely following that event, an activity which left little room for my habitual hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing, so all in all, despite the nights by myself, my situation cannot have been as bad as I first described it.

      Getting back to the main narrative-speculative thrust here, the epistemic distrust of awareness, particularly in the form of so-called introspection--just another term for consciousness, but which to analytical philosophers sounded like a witch-doctor's objurgations and made them fighting mad--led to such brilliant elaborations as behaviorism and identity theory. Behaviorism is the belief, evidently, that behavior is very important. Mind is not behavior, because otherwise we would fall into the mentalist trap. Behaviorists, in sum, denied mind, which of course made them mindless, about which they felt all chuffed up. They gained a lot of fame with an empty box, built at MIT, for "conditioning" children.

      You might think that Wittgenstein would at least have had a distant sympathy for behaviorists, but such was not the case at all. The English philosopher Ryle, whom Wittgenstein considered a follower--roughly what Sundance thought I was to him--came to the rescue of behaviorism with his theory of dispositions. Dispositions are, well, like habits, visible habits, less like thinking: "I am hungry all the time", than actually eating all the time. If you ate a lot you had a disposition to eat, and that was certainly much more real than just thinking about eating. However, Ryle did not mention language, like ordering a lot of food in a restaurant, and that really riled Wittgenstein, if you'll pardon the pun, who was heard to exclaim: "The magic is gone".

      Identity theory was another kettle of fish. Their BPI was that mind and matter were, obviously, identical. But how can that be? After all, when you see a lot of food on a table, you are not actually the food. You might want to make it part of you, but that is another problem. What identity theorists wanted to do, then, was to discover the way in which mind and matter were identical. This involved writing long, nearly impenetrable books about the right words or analogies for the relation between the mental and the physical. One of these theorists, considered spectacularly clever, argued that mind and matter were the same in the sense in which water and H2O refer to the same thing.

      Within the realm of analytical philosophy of mind, there was a particularly roily group formed by the practitioners of so-called neurophilosophy. They didn't even bother with analogies and other subtleties and went on record as saying that the knowledge of so-called mind followed upon the exploration of the brain. Period. They were touchy but not so dense as not to see that a brain cannot talk, so they accepted that "psychological loans" were needed in order for investigation to proceed. This was as likely a story as Frege's metalanguage or Dummett's "extrusion of thought". Despite their shortcomings, neurophilosophers coined the phrase "folk psychology" for reports of mental states, a very clever gambit considering what was implied: that by trepanning my brain they were in a better position to know more about my being hungry than I was, which put me in mind of the helpful assistant that Stalin sent to Trotsky in Mexico. 

What Gödel proved was that every number implies its denial, somewhat like taking  a calculator and turning it off after you pressed each number in turn

From what emerged at Clearwater--also despite the name, there was a lot of mud-slinging going on--neither identity theorists nor neurophilosophers were mainstream, because the BPI was that the original analytical approach to mind left much to be desired. How can you deny that what you are doing when you deny exists? Anti-mentalists also had to do a lot of contortions not to seem particularly introspective or assume any pose reminiscent of Rodin's "The Thinker", a sculpture of a naked man much vilified by analytical philosophers, who argued he was not necessarily thinking. This suggested that he might have been a worried nudist sitting on a rock, but no one really believed Rodin intended this. All of this and more is why less simple-minded philosophers could take over the proceedings merely on the strength of not going about spouting utter nonsense about thought, although they too came close.

      The simplest way out of the anti-mentalist trap, although not the most admirable, was the one chosen by Dennett, a lusty, wine-loving, baseball-playing thinker--he also denied that wine had taste, but this was probably his way of shocking his colleagues in Ohio--which consisted in calling introspection "heterophenomenology". For all this meant, he could as easily have called it "alterointrospectology", and the description of this methodology, akin to a psychoanalytic session on a tape machine, did not get you very far either.

      Dennet was delving into certain bizarre entities. He challenged his audiences by calling them zombies, an epithet or cognomen he did not intend with the macabre, Third-Worldish connotations it has. Or at least he thought they would not take offence, because what he meant by zombie was a thinking being devoid of consciousness, and this was tantamount to mindlessness, which, as we saw, was a bragging point with behaviorists. Homuncules was another one of Dennett's inventions. They suposedly explained cognition in zombies, but, as a fellow philosopher once remarked, in looking for root cognitive processes, Dennett kept coming up with stupider and stupider homunculi, possibly a below-the-belt blow because two stupid homunculi might conceivably think better than one.

      I could go on expounding my fascination with Dennett at Clearwater, but I musn't tarry. Besides, Dennett was part of a larger current of thought, known as functionalism, and it was this that grabbed the spotlight at Clearwater and is possibly still doing it in the wider field of analytical philosophy of mind for all I know. The reason for my ignorance, incidentally, is that, as I have found satisfactory answers to my dilemmas and though I do not pretend to have answers for every one on everything, I also do not feel the need to go over and over the same territory, which would be, mutatis mutandis, as if a physicists had actually found Higgs' bosons and had spent the rest of his life denying they existed.

      According to the philosopher Hilary Putnam, it was he who first proposed that the way computers function could be the key to understanding how mind works. This is what became known as functionalism. The reasoning behind this idea was that computers follow cognitive routines controlled through coordinated or interfaced softwares and, since computers can do mathematical operations much faster than human beings, it stood to reason that either human beings were computers or if they weren't it was practical to assume they were. Putnam had gone back on the functionalist premise arguing that mind was too complex to be "formalized". He based this recantation on Gödel's proof of the inconsistency of arithmetic and, by extension, of all formal deductive systems. What Gödel proved was that every number implies its denial, somewhat like taking  a calculator and turning it off after you pressed each number in turn. The way Gödel had gone about his proof was anything but elegant--apart from not having proved a damn thing, it involved a numbering system so complex you couldn't even use it to count your toes--but he gave many philosophers much food for thought.

Academics, as I have observed, have a marked tendency to exaggeration, which they occasionally mask with litotes, unless provoked beyond endurance, as by a question, when they become paranoically and aggressively hyperbolic

One who didn't give a damn was Fodor. He had not arrived at functionalism through a simple comparison of what humans and computers can do. He went about it the long way. The real source of philosophical functionalism, according to Fodor, was token identity theory, which stipulated that thought could occur in substances, such as plastic, copper, glass, wire, whatever (presumably not excluding food, cushions, leather gloves, etc.), other than brain-matter. This paved the way for the computer analogy. Fodor followed this roundabout way in order to maintain the requisite "scientific" discipline about mind on which mindless behaviorism--which he nevertheless found inadequate in itself--had a stranglehold. In trying to achieve scientific rigour, Fodor reminded me of the Wellsian metaphor for Henry James's style as that of an elephant trying to pick up a peanut.

      Fodor additionally argued that the analytical path back to mind lay in the study of cognition and specifically in Chomsky's modular and nativist arguments about language-learning. He made some further deductions from Chomsky: one, that there is an innate mental language, that in fact all knowledge is inherited, and two, that cognitive processes are modular and even encapsulated. Chomsky, who was known as an ultra-radical, a radical's radical, a bigger fire-eater than Scanlon, had designed a program to account for anaphoric reference, which occurs when you refer to some one twice in the same sentence, an achievement he found beyond comprehension. As politicians can refer to an issue many more times than that in one sentence, and contradict themselves every time, this may be what got Chomsky's dander up. Academics, as I have observed, have a marked tendency to exaggeration, which they occasionally mask with litotes, unless provoked beyond endurance, as by a question, when they become paranoically and aggressively hyperbolic.

      Fodor turned Chomsky's language-learning module into mentalese or mindioma, but typically in his field he overdid it by proposing an inherited repertoire of concepts or a mental lexicon and he was soon getting questions such as why cavemen had not painted airplanes instead of bisons. The same thing happened with modularity, which gave Fodor, and many others I might add, the idea that cognitive functions are specialized. Thus, theoretically there could exist a "logic module", a "numbers module", a "music module", a "perception module", a "golf module", a "jogging module", and so on.

      Modular theory was akin to Dennett's homuncules and the same objection was feasible: if you reduced cognitive functions to modules, capsules, homuncules, etc., you were scaling down, or as they now say, dumbing down, intelligence for the sake of a theory, which sounds like having a limp erection. It also is reminiscent of Procrustes, a pint-sized Greek highwayman who made his victims fit his bed by loping off the overhang. The gods justifiably meted out a similar fate to him, which he could have avoided by sticking to robbing people instead of trying to work out his shorty complex.

      Encapsulation was the argument that certain cognitive processes such as perception can function without interference from other beliefs. Some thought that Fodor had improvised it to counter holism, Quine's notion that beliefs function as a "corporate whole" and that if you modify one belief in a belief-system you modify the entire system, as in developing a taste for Guiness and dressing like a leprechaun, or for snails and sporting a béret. It was one of Quine's many weird ideas, which included that language can be inferred from the observation of behaviour, that mind produces a "torrential output" from meagre inputs, that theory is always underdetermined by evidence, and others.

      I am rushing a bit here because I do not want any one to think either that I have it in for Fodor or Quine or that I think they are the acme of analytical philosophy of mind. To close the chapter on Fodor, what he seemed to be proposing was a provisional theory of mind-research which could be called Reverse Humpty-Dumpty. It implied that, given the complexity of mind, it was necessary to decompose it into functions. Once its individual functional units had been thoroughly examined, there would come a phase when they could be put together again. The biggest problem with Fodor's version of functionalism was precisely its tendency to break down complexities and to separate normally interactive cognitive functions. In view of the mind/computer analogy, this tendency can partially be traced to that many of his theories were conceived before Windows 98 and its octopus-like display of interfaced software came on stream.

Logic went back to the first gathering of proterozoic bacteria, who without the Duck Principle would have been crashing into each other with untold consequences for the future of higher life forms (not to mention ducks)

One subject very dear to me on which Clearwater hardly did credit to its name was affects. Here and there I thought I could decry stumps of explanations, but they never sprouted into wings. Connectionism was an area of research in artificial intelligence, also known as AI, which has been left behind by advances in chip technology. It claimed that a link-up of many computers could do things that individual computers could not, which was in line with two stupid homunculi being better than one. Connectionism could also be compared to the hominid who thought a leg bone was the ultimate weapon. Weight of inputs and other connectionist concepts, now archaic, could only give a very inadequate account of emotions.

      Incidentally, AI was a crypto- or, more accurately, a pseudo-BPI about whether computers would eventually emulate brains, which, as far as I could tell, was none of philosophy's business. My opinion then as now is that philosophy and computation don't mix well because philosophers like to assume know-it-all poses and computer technology keeps leaving them behind, like a carney being upstaged by a karaoke.

      Another theory of affects compared them to a fire department where the entire cognitive system rang when things got too hot for comfort. As a whole, affects constituted a trouble-shooting module that came into action whenever the individual was in serious difficulties. But in suicide, which was more in the nature of a systems failure, affects acted like arsonists rather than fire-fighters.

      There were other educational experiences that I can trace back to Clearwater, but I will only mention to conclude the British contingent. It was led by a fellow named Strutting next to whom Dennett calling people zombies inhabited by homuncules was handing out PhDs. Strutting asked: "Is there anything in this congress for the intelligent man (or woman) in the street? The answer to that is a resounding, ball-(or ovary-)smashing NO. I doubt whether anything that has been said here would be accessible even to anyone. But that is probably in the nature of progress in philosophy. Large vague questions can be raised which you out there find intelligible and interesting, such as: How is it possible for our minds to represent an itch in the leg? Might our idea simply fail to match the degree of our hunger? How is it that what goes on in our minds can cause our hand to scratch our leg or move our body towards a table with food in ways that are appropriate to the content of our beliefs, intentions, etc.? But by the time these questions have been made precise enough to be answerable, and a detailed and intellectually satisfying answer has emerged, like having scratched our leg or having had something to eat, the limits of understanding of you dimwits has long been passed." I found his point of view very Husserlian and I transcribed parts of his talk although some errors might have slipped in because of the speed of his thought and my inability to keep up with it.

      What I did definitely get from Clearwater were some basic concepts I would soon find occasion to use. I considered that Russell had entirely missed the point about logic and how it pervaded all of experience, if only because in identifying objects mind implicitly obeyed innate logical principles. This went back to the first gathering of bacteria, who without the Duck Principle would have been crashing into each other with untold consequences for the future of higher life forms (not to mention ducks).

      The concept of a mental language would stay with me, although I eventually transmuted it into an analogy for neurons. Despite my unmitigated contempt for neurophilosophy I wasn't stupid enough, notwithstanding the drubbings I received from Dennett and Strutting, to believe that mind could be anything but corporeal. Although initially sceptical about the emulative power of computers in relation to mind, when I read that some big corporation might have developed a quantum chip, which uses the structure of the atom for computation, I knew the jig was up. And consciousness was no obstacle.

      It was in Clearwater that I first heard the Tungusic room argument, according to which a perfect translation by a machine is inferior to an imperfect translation by a human. I wasn't convinced and call me simple but I was inching towards the belief that too much, or too little, can be made of the terrifying concept of consciousness, which is just perceiving, having thoughts, and knowing the difference between the two. If you'll remember the case of Papillon, the inability to differentiate between perceiving and remembering can result in talking to yourself and other symptons characteristic of non compos mentis. Everything in consciousness could be tinged by affects. Beyond that, consciousness is the epiphenomenal recall of itself, from which, however, you can derive freedom, soul, and immortality. Not that I ever believed such derivations justified.

      Before the congress ended I thought I had found the solution to the gratuituous-erections problem in the distinction between libido and desire, which showed that all erections are caused however innocently spontaneous they may seem. More importantly, I had hit upon the crucial insight that our thoughts take place in time, one after another, which entails that they are produced by subconscious cognitive processes, in proof of which I could cite my unwitting ideological seesaw from radical leftism to extreme cynicism. To describe this process, I found the word enantiodromia--sesquipedalian and abstruse but better than double-dealing, unprincipled, intellectual jellyfish--which could also advert to the question: what does it mean to say that you believe this or that?

      There were many questions outstanding, particularly what good all these concepts were, because they had nothing to do with the real problem I would be facing on my return to London. For this I can blame as much my own overconfidence as Buzakri's dishonesty.

I discovered that there existed a special mechanism in my brain and that it was doing the deciding for me, like one of Fodor's modules or Dennett's homuncules gone bonkers

As you will recall, when I had started dabbling in futures, my intention was to speculate in currencies. I had not explicitly ruled out that Buzakri apply his moving averages abracadabra and this he had interpreted as meaning that he could do what he pleased with at least half my fortune. He had liquidated my long positions in currencies, which were still making profits for me, though not as dramatically fast as at the start, and he began to go long and short and not only in currencies but also in bonds and stock indexes and anything risky he could think of except maybe pork bellies, which had become a joke and he did not want to attract attention. Needless to say, Buzakri was fiddling other accounts besides mine. What I figured afterwards--although admittedly my powers of figuring were weak--was that he did believe in moving averages and he was trying to make a fortune for himself without affecting my own, but as was to be expected from such a goofy approach to trading--you cannot buck a trend by alternately buying and selling, because at one time or another either buying or selling you're going to get caught with your pants down--he began losing a lot of my money and he wasn't making any for himself, so he did what could have been foreseen which was that he dipped into his Arab clients' gold and when he was caught out he fled to Syria, where he expected he would be safe because that country's relations with the Saudis were not good.

      I did not know this until I was called by the manager of the brokerage house--it