MIRE

Let's start by scotching the infamous lie that Schroedinger's cat had two penises

For all the reader knows I could be dead or alive, although self-evidently he or she will surmise I was alive when I wrote all this. As it also could be a gigantic suicide note, please, just humour me (for the sake of the "plot") and suppose that I could indeed be dead or alive, which all it makes me is like Schrödinger's cat, you know, the one you didn't know whether he was dead or alive until you looked inside the box where the hapless feline was confined with a vial of poison gas. The reason for this was the counter-intuitive quantum physics law that the "substance" of reality is a "wave function" and the location of "matter" is, literally, a matter of probability and can only be established by the observer. I realized the truth of this when I started playing golf and after swinging I had no precise idea where the ball had gone until it had been located by the caddy or a sharp-sighted and kind-hearted golfing partner, but this is far ahead in this story. All I ask now is that you imagine I am confined between the covers of this book and accept on trust that I am very neurotic, in fact possibly the last of the great neurotics, a claim the arrogance of which I will explain in due time.

      The realization that I was a neurotic came to me relatively late in life, although much later I grew sceptical about what it was I had learned. This is the story of how that came about. I cannot even guarantee at this point it is not the fantasy of an alienated mind or the ravings of an idiot, so this is another concession I must beseech of the reader from the start. It begins with a bloody gobbet with a bad eye and an undescended testicle. The latter condition is called cryptorchidism.

      According to a set of lyrics to the Colonel Bogey March Hitler "has only got one ball", but this was never verified because the Russians, if they did find any autopsiable remains, have kept the secret to themselves. This might have the air of closet necrophilia about it, but it hardly is the case, because they still have a mummy encased in crystal, like Snow White, in the center of Moscow, and it is no secret that it was they who stuffed Ho Chi Minh's mummy, though not Mao's, which the Chinese botched so badly they had to acupuncture the formaldehyde out of it. 

      I felt in better company when I came across this passage (which has to be read in an appropriately emphatic Midwestern twang): "To hell with my arm. You lose an arm you lose an arm. There's worse things than lose an arm. You've got two arms and you've got two of something else. And a man's still a man with one arm and with one of those." The theatrics--ho-hum Hemingway you might call them--sounded personal and sincere. After all, why not say you also have two eyes or two feet or two buttocks without any specificatory relation to manhood? Consequently, the author must have been referring to testicles. The only other possible masculine genital allusion would be to penis, but two of those would have been an odd phenomenon indeed.

      I never felt I was ever short of hormones--if anything around women I have had the suspicion I was a potential rapist, which with age has become the certainty I am a paedophile--but my father, a Patricius and Parakoimemenos who hated eunuchs, never got over the shock. I am certain that when he saw me he wanted to use his revolver, which is ironical considering how he himself ended. Rather than in any real inclination to rape, my confession above may stem from a truly freakish sense of guilt, which is heavy but not ostensible enough to drum up in a circus sideshow. I mean it comes and goes and even a carney would not be caught hyping a crabman who put on gloves with two finger. As to paedophilia, I know it seems shocking at first blush but there are ways of looking at it which do not have a porno-film connotation. This weakness of the flesh is not incompatible with the rank of Emperor, nor with musical genius, nor with, apparently, being a lepidopterologist, which is not something every one would prefer to having a thing for catamites, known in the shtetls as gunsels. And to stay strictly on the side of fairness, Tiberius probably got a bad rap from Suetonius and Nabokov created Humbert Humbert out of whole cloth as a symbol of Old World weariness and spiritual exhaustion. As to the rumours about Schubert I can only say that they are no more than that, as if word had gotten around that De Gaulle was a flasher because he named André Malraux, who had a weakness for Balthus, whose naked nubile girls were once the rage, Minister of Culture in the Fifth Republic.

      Getting back to my own case, that I was choosy about the women I could love or that I was the studious sort worried my father so much he arranged meetings with hetairas for me--as if I needed him for that!--and when he couldn't do it himself, he charged my uncle, a Taxiarch and Economos, with setting me up with them. It was through my uncle that I met Nilda...but here I am taking a very long jump in time and I had best try to keep to some roughly chronological order.

      The undescended testicle was yanked out not too long ago by a surgeon with a grudge because I told him I didn't trust quacks, which was not clear thinking on the eve of an operation and was probably due to the narcotics. Or maybe not. When afterwards I developed a bursitis on my right elbow, it felt like a steam-pressed scrotum and it hurt, so I could imagine my missing ball had been hiding in my armpit or thereabouts and was still pumping away. That was about the time it was discovered that brain cells go on reproducing until either Alzheimer's kills them or you die. It was obvious that there was still much to be discovered about the human body and I could well have been the bearer of an unheralded wonder of nature.

      While I am still on the subject of testicles I might as well bring in politics. To those who know the history of the Byzantine Empire the titles I used for my father and his brother will be familiar. Our Kingdom was not imperial by any means, but it had a court and lickspittles and tax farmers and all the rest. It was a small sequestered place with bad roads, so crammed with crustal wrinkles that you could drive down a mountainside and up a 15,000-foot dormant volcano and down to a coast and across to another coast and back up to your mountain in one day. You could do it if you got up at day break and had a passion for driving so strong it could put up with the discomfort of having inside you an unbaked mass of panettone instead of a bladder. But that's what they told tourists and it seemed to work for the place was crawling with them.

      My beloved country was also being subsidized by entomologists who argued that ants and bugs were absolutely crucial for the survival of mankind. Every day one million species are extinguished, they would cry in anguish, and even panic-prone arachnophobes would shake their heads and tsk-tsk as if their best friends were tarantulas. I always suspected that what these nature-lovers feared for were their field trips to the Tropics and looking sweaty and saying in front of steadycams things like: "See how this repulsive snake wriggles around my arm". But there is more creativity than veracity involved in these exercises as can be observed in "documentaries-to-far-away-places" in which the presenter, usually a doll but sometimes (for the sake of authenticity) a dog, always says that travelling from point x to point y takes untold hours "in a bus", neglecting to mention that said bus is followed by another bus carrying the steady-cams and the platoons of technicians who make sure the documentaries look "authentically far-away" and the tons of local currencies needed to make the natives instant soulmates, unless they are devious and ask for payment in dollars.

      When I work up a good head, I can argue that an answer to the entomologists' earnest pleas on behalf of jungles is that great and rich countries open their doors to the poor and downtrodden in the torrid latitudes, but this they will not do because, it is argued, these people are not prepared for living in civilized societies. This is bunk because I have met people quite at home in Brooklyn who spoke very broken Spanish with heavy Amerindian accents. The more likely explanation I found in a magazine and it concerned a freedom rider who drank too many beers and became rapturous (and punchy) about The Birth of a Nation.

      Be that as it may, when I was born our Tyranos had been dead since the beginning of my intrauterine life. He was a big, shrewd illiterate with large Stalinesque mustachios. King Vincent, as he styled himself, had his trusted executors, who never failed to extract confessions by hanging his enemies from the balls. This also had to be a concoction, but it made good copy for travel books and exotic pop-histories, which to my unflagging astonishment have always attracted a host of loyal and insatiable naifs.

      Another form of torture was the "screw", and it's not what the reader might be thinking, but a rope tied around a man's head looped to a lever at the back which would be twisted until the victim's cranium cracked or more likely he confessed to anything starting with having a strong attachment to his head and being allergic to migraines. I cannot vouch for its application, but it is physically possible, unlike hanging by the balls, which would produce the sound of a rope slipping accompanied by a strong sense of relief, or a ripping sound and a strong sense of regret, both sounds however very difficult to obtain, and I knew enough about my countrymen to believe they were capable of such methods. Besides they hadn't invented them. My guess is that they were first applied when some humans, their savage hunting-gathering past behind them, had enough time in their hands to entertain really sophisticated thinking.

      Whatever the facts, I was weaned on such stories and developed a hatred of torturers so misguided I believed that if you tortured torturers to death you could do away with torture. It's unbelievable but I believed it (and I suspect I still do). And why not? Hollywood, which is usually a good barometer of public opinion, has been saying over and over that Vietnam War atrocities were the exclusive responsibility of mad-dog second lieutenants and non-coms understudying Timur the Lame, who used to blame his soldiers when things got out of hand, as during the sudden depopulation of Delhi. Another movie icon, capital punishment, with about the deterrent power of a flea collar, is implicit in every scene depicting a criminal as evil to the last grunt. And aren't there untold millions for whom justice is expressed in the guttural one-liner: "Hasta la vista, baby!"? So you could say that my hatred of torture was comfortably lowbrow, although my social origins were not lowly by any means. I called my father a Patricius and Parakoimemenos, but he was not part of the scene during King Vincent's time. My uncle who had been a Taxiarch, although a minor one, had sent him abroad for an university education. When he returned sporting a béret and talking like a Castilian--he dropped the pretense after a bit of gentle ridicule, to which he was allergic--he had the requisites for making it in the world of the Dynasts whom King Vincent had groomed. These men were rank-and-file with some polish but they later abjured their sponsor's more brutal ways and made tentative gestures towards parliamentarianism.

Stone-throwing, usually at green mangoes, the national sport, was allowed from a distance at the mansions of some prominent plutocrats

King Vincent was followed by Dynast Eleazar, a tall lean disciplinarian who knew enough to let the mobs rampage for a few days after his predecessor's demise before imposing his authority. A few policemen were barbecued or hung like piñatas from lampposts. Stone-throwing, usually at green mangoes, the national sport, was allowed from a distance at the mansions of some prominent plutocrats. Thus, Eleazar distanced himself from the past and Patricians like my father could make careers for themselves.

      Thinking on these events, it seemed unfair to me that Tyranos Vincent should have died undisturbed in bed, but this was part of my torture-the-torturers idealism. Even if I do get a bit ahead of my story, I must say I was a sucker for propaganda, every bit as naif as the fans of NG documentaries or the followers of the adventures of Australian guidebook writers, who gape around and conclude that tourists are morons and shouldn't be allowed out of their hotel rooms. This naivete might be an attitude I copied from my mother, but when I try to fit the pieces they don't seem to match, because, although she liked to claim the contrary, she was never entirely taken in by my father. The solution to this conundrum lies in that you have to be slow-witted yourself to waste time on jigsaw puzzles, but this took a long time to sink in. You could say that this in a nutshell is what these memoirs are about.

Santa Claus in a satiny night gown brought me a shuttlecock but I could not make heads or tails of it

The facts are what I have to stick to and these were that when my parents met--through the machinations of a matchmaker aunt who knew how to put two and two together--my father was already a Parakoimemenos with a foot on Antihypatus. My mother's father was an ersatz penniless Protoespatharius--a minor rank granted to succesful claimants of fiefs, which he wasn't, succesful I mean--and she couldn't avoid being overwhelmed. But she did exaggerate when she declared that such was to be her natural state for the rest of her life. What makes even less sense is that when things started going badly for my father, by then a former Apocrisiary, my mother always knew exactly how to use her terrifying assortment of harmless-looking but painful devices. She also practiced her expertise on me, God knows why.

      I lost or never had the count of houses, not to mention hotels, I lived in as a child, but I would say an average of about four a year until my twelfth year would not be off target. Some of my best engraved memories are of trips and short stays. I have a good recollection of a dry sunny windy island and a city with a swiveling pontoon bridge and tight little buildings with imitation Dutchmen inside them. The imitation Dutchmen were Jewish jewelers and the blacks got so accustomed to glaring at them that eventually they turned down flat an offer of independence, and got away with it, unlike our little Kingdom which acquired independence though no one wanted it outside of Britain and a stubborn general who in his sad decline exhorted all who could to flee the country. Few could and the plucky little fellow died of consumption, his bones like chalk marks over his body. I saw this in an itinerant wax show including (in another room) swollen vulva and ulcerous penises, all in vivid yellow and red.

      Another memorable short stay was in a mountain city where with a local girl of my young age I smoked in a stairwell a whole pack of a brand of cigarettes called Redskins, which might have gotten their name from the effect they had on the lungs. It must have taken the whole of a half hour, so we were practically begging to get caught, and we were. I expected a beating but got a lecture on stunting which stuck with me until I was over five feet tall and realized the worst that could happen was that I would become a very tall dwarf.

      This city was very high and cool and drizzly. For causes now forgotten we moved from there about three thousand feet down to a large village equally cool and drizzly. The most eventful occasion here was the evening the neighbourhood was in a dim uproar shouting and throwing stones at a "witch". The incident was provoked by the idiot next door who would do impromptu imitations of a baying dog. That might have been the beginning of my dislike for morons, but this is quite a leap in time and its explanation requires some decisive additional influences, like how I came to harbor the suspicion I myself was a sort of idiot.

      With the constant house-moving and but for his rank, the Antihypatus might have made a good deal buying a trailer home for my mother and me, but he normally didn't recognize commercial opportunities if they stepped on his toes. When I am in a revisionist mood, which is about once every two thoughts, I am inclined to believe he didn't care about money at all. He was keen on not owing any one anything, but he was proud of his Curopalates connections and he himself went as high as Magister. At a certain moment he realized he wouldn't be getting from life much more than what came with that rank and this made him cherish his financial independence all the more. So he did care about money, which he made (and lost) by the tons, as he must have cared about many other things--he was fascinated by political power, for instance--but in the balance of my reckonings now, he always seemed detached and sarcastic, curiously alienated despite his many undeniable successes.

      Our instability produced with some frequency happenings odd enough to stick in my mind. At one time we lived in a house with the utterly inscrutable name of "Felsenek". It had a columned portico and imitation ashlars and there was nothing Egyptian about it but to this day I can think back and imagine I lived in some mid-Nile nomos during the New Kingdom. The place seems burined in me as if I had been inside it until yesterday, but I know this cannot be right because I have been fooled too many times to believe that memory is like something you hang on a wall. Skipping details, I remember "Felsenek" as rectangular in shape with a simple lengthwise distribution: social areas to the left (looking from the front), bedrooms to the right. I slept in the first room. One night I saw or imagined a burglar climbing into my room. This memory tends to fuse with the one in which Santa Claus in a satiny nightgown brought out of a closet some boxes I had already seen. One contained a badminton set, which I did nothing with except try to decipher the purpose of the shuttlecock. Santa Claus didn't know either. Her husband cannot have been about and I doubt that he would have known any more than she did.

      The time the cops came something had been stolen and one of our servants was suspect. To me the episode was as fascinating as it was unfathomable. In our itinerant way of life we didn't live badly but we collected few things, so there was little to steal and what there was didn't merit making such a fuss about, apart from the danger of policemen stealing what a burglar might have missed or despised. This is overlayered with the recall that my mother had no compunctions about using me to steal from the Antihypatus. Ways of the palace, I thought then, even though we never actually lived in a palace, but those times are long gone and I am not as influenceable as I once was.

Even though we lived in more hotels than houses, I have no recollection of them at all and this is quite unusual since I love hotels as much as I hate airports and I can make a long impressively sounding list of the ones I do remember. In the worst one, the pillows felt as if they had been stuffed with Taconite and the rate was one dollar a day all meals included. There are too many candidates for best. My favorites, however modest, are those with glass-ceilinged dining rooms. Fabulous!

Trained at Pavlov's academy, I reject Freud's derivative notion that all I needed was a good nose job

My mother had this trick which never failed to reduce me to a quivering mass of flesh. She would sit in front of me, then she would look down and tell me about the hotels. I would listen and start blubbering for all appearances as if she was Pavlov and I was a hungry canine. The conditioning must have taken place in the hotels themselves and that may be why I cannot remember them.

      All of this became fodder for my epistemology and even my theory of history but a very long time had to elapse before I could bring myself to accept the simple fact about mind that it occurs in time and that awareness can only accomodate one thought at a time, the rest being beyond reach in the subconscious. Lest any one infer that my story is merely a Freudian exercise, let me say right away I do believe that Freud was a disciple of Fliess, the physician who taught that all it took to shape up a person was a good nose operation, and I believe no one wrote more platitudes than Fromm (apart maybe from Popper), or more nonsense than Jung, and I also believe Wilhelm Reich deserved the jail time he got for mail fraud, although his orgone box--portable saunas with advertised aphrodisiac properties--might have become a huge success in our more spendthrift times.

      One effect of my Pavlovian training was that without intending it--though from another perspective, in as much control of my own self as Kant ever was of his--I was always considering ways to avoid the hassle, which I had trouble coping with because I did not understand and if there is one thing I have always hated is perplexity. I mean, I was trying to mind my own business and I did not appreciate the constant and gratuitous meddling in my affairs and I reasoned that maybe, just maybe, I could get them to back off if I slinked out of the way or played roadkill possum, a common enough event. This deviousness was a significant part of my personality and the reason I did not realize earlier in life I was a devoted and dedicated, unexampled and unmitigated neurotic--actually border-line psychotic turned out to be closer to the truth--has to be sheer ignorance, although not greater than that of Flyer, the eminent literary critic and scholar, who should have shown a little more subtlety in his appraisal of Hemingway.

      I remember him as if he were now telling a hundred or so sophomores the myth of Philoctetes as the bridge between art and neurosis. The problem that afflicted Philoctetes, a Homeric archer, was a mysterious wound that stank up the ship so much his companions dropped him off in a deserted island, which today would have been as if the parking slots for the handicapped were hemmed in by walls or as if ramps for wheelchairs had speed bumps. Now, most neurotics have nothing as physical as Philoctetes' fetid wound to show for their neurosis, so what was so special about him? Why was Philoctetes, and not, for instance, the many artists that Dante consigned to Hell in such anxiety-generating situations as being up to their necks in shit or hanging from their feet over cauldron of scalding vomit, singled out to symbolize the neurotic artist? The only answer I could come up with was that neurosis and anxiety were so resistant to rational expression that they cried for an arcane and arbitrary metaphor.

      Anyway, when Flyer was done with Philoctetes, he would reflect softly, as if to himself: "But suppose Hemingway came crashing through that door now, bared his chest, and shouted: `What about me?'" What about him indeed! This showed about as much insight as the think-tank fellow who, even after Gorbachev had inaugurated Perestroika, kept saying that communism was stronger than ever. But it was good fun and it got a chuckle or two.

      In my case, the evidence for neurosis was glaring. The first instance I can remember was the time I refused to participate in a school show in which I had to recite some simple-minded doggerel. I lived in the pits about this failure until I came to understand I was simply repugnant to making a fool of myself. Later there was an arithmetic battle in which the class was divided into two groups whose members shouted the multiplication tables at each other. I started and knocked out more than half the "enemy". Then somebody answered correctly and looked at me straight in the eye--the bad one, which has a tendency to quiver--and asked how much was seven times three. I thought about it for a fraction of a second and decided the game was so unworthy I might as well get out of it. In sum, it was obvious I did not want to participate.

      It wasn't so much that I despised my fellow classmates as that I thought I had better things to do than show I knew dumb-bunny level arithmetic. I ignore what went through Philoctetes' mind when his companions were deciding to dump him--he was basically a sniper and the range was too close for his archer's skill to matter--but if I had been in his predicament I would have welcomed their decision. I wanted to be left alone and I especially resented those who took a friendly interest in me. There was a classmate who tried to be particularly nice. I put a stop to that by deliberately tripping him as he walked down a classroom aisle smiling past me. He fell forward with a resounding splat and when he got up he muttered that it was a good thing he did not wear his wristwatch strapped under the wrist, which was the in thing in our little school world. Sorry, Tico, wherever you may be!

Despite her state of overawed gratitude, my mother orders her cataphracts to ambush my father without his armour on

My refusals climaxed at about the time the Antihypatus was made honorary Logothete and he was dallying about with other Parakoimemeni. He had a special other--other than my mother--who looked as lovely and harmless as a Tanagra but had a knowledge of tactics so unsettling my mother had to collect a squad of cataphracts to fend off the attacks. She also used them in prolonged, rowdy, and noisome skirmishes with my father, especially when she managed to overcome her state of overawed gratitude and ambushed him without his armour on, which, given my exposure to her mawkish hotel-conditioning, never stopped being another source of bewilderment. Added to this violence was weariness with our caravaneering, so I decided to commit suicide.

      I cannot say that was my real intention because the method I chose was well provided with escape hatches. I would lay down in the middle of the street and wait for a car to approach--traffic was light then in our Kingdom's capital--upon which I would get up and rush inside our yard. I did this for a long time before somebody told my parents to put me in a cage. Since apart from this I wasn't making much of a splash, not to mention letting cars' wheels get even close, I on my own suspended my little experiment in felodese, but it did leave me with a taste for danger and skirting edges. When many years later I decided I wanted to experience all that life had to offer, what I had in the back of my mind was the desire to see how many risks I could take before backing out or getting smashed. Perhaps I thought I would always find a way out of any predicament I got myself into, but I never used a safety net or prepared a fallback plan. Eventually, the odds bit back, but this is pitching too far ahead in my story.

      Of my pathognomonic bent to evasion, another episode merits mentioning and that was a religious phase I went through after the Kingdom was overthrown and I was living in America. At the time I used to go to confession every Saturday evening in order to cleanse my soul before communion Sunday. It made me feel good to go through the routine of admitting to having impure thoughts and using bad words. I know "fuck" wasn't one of them. It was what I had in mind in all those reprehensible thoughts. Nevertheless, my piety was so intense that I actually believed I had a deep-down calling for the priesthood or something. There was a priest who befriended me and he was the very image of what I thought a holy man should be: patient, soft-spoken, serene. I consulted him about my potential vocation, but I didn't insist too much on the subject, because, to be quite honest, I wasn't really convinced I wanted to go through life without having sex.

      My religious inclination wasn't really that tenacious although it did survive what happened afterwards. I was attending a school run by nuns. One of these, a ruddy-faced, unsmiling fat woman, one day hit the class cut-up with a ruler in the legs and, to my astonishment, Mr. Cut-Up grabbed the ruler and ruled her back, to little effect because of her huge pleated black gown. The shocking thing was the insubordination, which resulted in that my friend the gentle chaplain was replaced by a loud-mouth, carrot-top Irishman who could easily have played a part in a movie. This wasn't my idea of priesthood and even though I retained my Roman Catholic faith I pretty much got over my previous religious velleities.

      Ironically, it was through my persistence in going to confession that I finally did make the break. It happened that one day I stole a carton of cigarettes from a box in front of a canteen in a boarding school I was attending. This was a real sin and it cried for the confessional. It was one of my first excursions to the edge and it seemed quite harmless then--even more so in retrospect, for thieving never was one of my vices--and I expected to get off with an increase in the usual dosage of Hail Marys.

      To my surprise, the priest told me I had to make restitution. Now, how was I to do that without making public my crime? And more to the point, what kind of a cleansing ritual was the sacrament of confession if, when you really needed it, you were practically denied absolution? I might as well have been a Puritan with a notice saying "thief" hung about my neck. I felt as betrayed as Henry VIII by Thomas More and although I could not have a head loped off I could pluck faith in me by the roots, which by then weren't that deep anyway. But I am going helter skelter and I must try to submit to some vaguely sequential discipline.

The kibitzers shouted: "Kill him, kill him", indiscriminately at two scared galumphs fighting over a wet tee shirt

I used the expression "bloody gobbet" before, which might not be as explicit to others as it is to me. What I had in mind was my reluctance to leave my mother's womb--maybe knowing something in the gestation process was missing--and the obstetrician had to hook me out by main force causing a lot of bleeding and lacerations. As humans are born with a basic knowledge of logic, certainly more than they will ever acquire through education, I attributed my pre-natal recalcitrance to foresight.

      Besides his weird opinions and chauvinist-piggish pontifications, Freud also had a knack for making meaningless statements that smacked of profundity. One of these said that birth was the prototype of the anxiety effect. Armed once more by my long acquaintance with neurosis, I beg to differ. Anxiety is ultimately the fear of death, and just as it is a bodily chemistry that can turn a crowd of savants into a mob of squealing lemmings as it dawns on them that maybe they shouldn't have been playing follow-the-leader, so it can be transmitted in the blood stream. What I am saying is that while the Parakoimemenos was out fishing the troubled waters of dynastic politics, my mother was anxiously examining her precarious situation, which considering the uncertainties--probably those damn hotels again!--was a kind of partial death. What I deduce is that she was going through alternating states of relief and fear, warm hope and frigid despair, and if that's what it was like for her, my own thought processes were surely questioning the need to go out into a place where such discomforts could occur.

      This wasn't like inventing the wheel or discovering calculus. It was a simple deduction involving the principle that even as a foetus I must have known that all experience was individual. Supposing that past a certain stage my brain was already active, then it must have sensed the comfort of the uterus--being upside down wouldn't have made any difference because that's the only position I had ever known--and if these painful blood-line intrusions occasionally disturbed my placidity, then something had to be going on outside my own restricted world-in-the-womb and that had to be a world different from this one; but as there was a self-evident difference between my feelings and what caused them, it stood to reason that in the inferred world there also had to be a difference between experience and its causes. There being two different sets of experiences in two different worlds, inevitably my own experience was different from any other experience. All this can be expressed with variables and the function-symbols of predicate logic and need not involve even a hint of ordinary external-world sensation, which I first experienced with the extreme violence of the birth-trauma.

      In my life, violence was to become the complement of instability. It came in many forms and to different degrees of real or perceived intensity. There was the time I cornered a cat in the backyard at "Felsenek" and the silly snarling creature leaped on my head and sunk its claws near my forceps scars before scurrying to where she had hidden her litter. But there was also the time my cousin was found strung out on a wooden palisade held together by rusty barbed wire, which caused his death from tetanus shortly afterwards.

      We were living then in a provincial capital whose streets had been laid out properly but were mostly still ravines. It was near one of those would-be streets that one day I saw two grown men grunting and rolling, raising clouds of dust as they grappled to the death with each other, surrounded by a crowd who looked gleefully on. When later I understood that if fighters really want to harm each other they bite and gouge, I put the childhood scene in its proper light, which was that the two galumphs probably had a falling out over a wet tee shirt and were so scared of each other they hung on in a clinch waiting and hoping some one would separate them. To my then untrained eyes it was pure savagery, especially with the dust and the groans and the kibitzers saying: "Kill him, kill him", indistinctly to both.

My invention of the limp-as-death maneuver fails and I am forced to dance a jota in honour of Our Lady of the Pillar (and of the Post)

My direct experience of violence went from the merely humiliating to the life-threatening. The time I accidentally threw dirt in a young servant girl's face and the Antihypatus had a guard whip me--I think he got his egalitarian or sadistic quirks during his university years in Madrid--was bad enough. To this day I still cannot remember having intentionally done anything wrong, although my inveterate revisionism suggests I might have created one of my walking-to-the-edge situations.

      But the most embarrassing and painful experience was inflicted on me directly by the Antihypatus himself. At the time I was enroled in a Marist school which had two floors and a huge rectangular courtyard surrounded by corridors on which the classrooms were located. The courtyard was not a playground but a barren space with concrete walkways used on the occasions our teachers--to a man, except for a gay brother who was later expelled from the order, veterans or supporters of the Spanish Falange--wanted to address the assembled student body. I had become emboldened by the success of my refusals and that particular day I decided I wasn't in the mood to go to school, which as I hated it so much was something I had been thinking about doing for a long time. Maybe my mother tried reasoning but she was a pushover. The Antihypatus caught the wind. When he had finished putting on the uniform of his rank--white sharkskin suit, white shirt, sober tie, and matching belt and wingtips (fedoras were optional due to the hot climate)--he grabbed me by the arm and roughly took me to the car. My excuse till then was not feeling well which I knew was a lie, but the way things were going I turned on the death screams, which didn't cut any ice either in the car, air conditioned and untraversable by my hideous cries for help, or as I was pushed out in front of the school.

      It was at this point I invented the limp-as-death tactics which became so widespread some time ago, perversely among right-to-lifers, whom I obviously detest because of my birth trauma. I thought I could still make the Antihypatus relent. But no! It wasn't to be. My progenitor was past reason and he wasn't going to let a shrieking brat dictate terms to an Antihypatus and Honorary Logothete. It didn't matter either that in the course of his career he himself had to swallow the guff Caesares and Nobilissimi and even Curopalates served him. He unbuckled and snapped out his belt and beating me rhythmically across the legs and buttocks dragged me screaming down the corridors of the Marist school to my assigned classroom where, by then much subdued, I was seated at my usual place, the desk at the head of the class reserved for the student with the best weekly grades.

      After that I not only put a stop to my refusals but I dressed up like an Aragonese peasant--black breeches, red cummerbund, bandanna, not unlike Don Jose when he was living with Carmen in the rough--I danced a jota in praise of our Lady of the Pillar (and I might add the Post), and I would even have jumped through a hoop and barked if I had been ordered to. So as to cut any commiseration in the bud, let me just add that in my deviousness and shirking I was also plotting unholy acts of revenge that in due time culminated in a deed so deeply malignant iy may be the cause why I started by saying that I could now be either dead or alive.

      Though I tried hard to avoid it, violence seemed to pursue me or to happen wherever I went. The priests and brothers were particularly nasty. A Jesuit once lambasted me for no reason other than that an eraser fell off its blackboard ledge during prayer. I might have nudged it, but this is pure revisionism. A brother named Felix slapped me because I laughed at a classmate he had just finished slapping about. It was like a chain reaction.

      Even animals acted up around me as if I looked like a good candidate for prey. One day a poisonous snake was coiled beneath my pedal car, the prize possession of my life, which I might have been given in compensation for the useless badminton set. Grown-ups killed the snake with boiling water which in my view was a bit of an overreaction, even though I was the person to whom the snake posed a threat. Even things acted with unpredictable menace and my car--it might have been a toy to others but to me it was a real car--fell and gashed my leg one day I had careened it to check its empty underside for oil leaks. Once a rabid Chow was all over me and the only reason he didn't bite me was that for a while he couldn't decide where to take the first chunk off. He certainly slobbered me well and good. Strangely enough since then I have always had the feeling that I can take on any dog, bar maybe a freaked out Great Dane, and even this beast I could decommission with a bat.

      Fortunately, violence circled around me but it never really pounced, not physically at any rate, for I would not care to make a diagnosis about other marks it might have left, which make no difference anyway, for, as they say, it is broken bones that hurt, and I am still alive and can write about these things and enjoy doing it. That wasn't the case of the little girl struck by a car on a highway and left there like the quintessence of limpness, or the other one struck in traffic gushing blood from her nostrils and mouth. It amazed me that such frail tiny things could dent fenders or smash headlights and still retain their human shape. More pathetic still was the old man in Upper Manhattan dead in a street corner the groceries for that evening's meal cracked and splattered on the black pavement. He was an embittered son of a bitch who had smacked me across the face with a bundle of newspapers and I am not sure whether I felt pity or satisfaction.

      All in all, life wasn't bad and does not call for subfusc prose. It never is for the majority of people most of the time. This becomes clear as time passes and the natural good feeling that goes with just being alive begins to wane. Not that I am an old man, but I have gone through different phases after which I emerged feeling a little or a lot less chipper than before. The first time was after spending forty-five days in a military jail on a ridiculous charge. I lost weight, my body's defenses were low, and not long after being released and deported from Costaguana, I contracted mumps and as I was a grown man the infection, which in a child might have passed in days if not hours, became virulent.

      I have always been prey to a nervous seemingly inexhaustible energy which has prompted my enemies, as I have been told, to compare me to a hyperactive seal, which is unfair because I don't bob my head and I do a lot of talking. My father, Magister rank and all, was dubbed "the jumpy lizard" by a Curopalates and the phrase stuck despite his hating it so much the absurdity of a frolicking cold-blooded animal did nothing to soothe his pride. I still have a tendency to gratuituous surges of joy, as if I had been hardwired to sing "An die Freude" every so often as a sign of good health--computers do automatic virus scans at regular intervals and make big displays of the results--so I can understand, though hardly envy, people laughing and singing in makeshift cardboard-and-rag "sleeperettes" in noisy and dangerous construction sites or living permanently in shacks next to railroad tracks.

      My restlessness made absolute repose, the only medicine for mumps at the age I got them, impossible, and I thought that if I spent five minutes without moving I was doing great. I believed the sickness would blow over in a few a days, but instead, from having the usual swellings in the neck, I went to orchitis, and then my head started hurting, a sure sign of encephalitis, which was when my physician, Doug Rickety, a prosperous homeopath but a splendid clinician, threw his methods to the winds and injected me with so many antibiotics they cut the sickness short but also killed off all they could find that wasn't actually part of my body. The upshot was that my stomach started acting up badly--the intestinal flora had been decimated--and in general I felt as if all the aging I had accumulated in my life had suddenly been thrown at me like a bag of cement I could not carry and could not drop. My next aging phase came some ten years later...but I see I am straying once more, so let me rewind back to where I thought that life on the whole was OK and expand on that.

André refuses to roll a hoop into the septic tank but his wife provides me with fodder for some precocious sexual dreams

Sex was not a regular part of my childhood cenesthesia, but it was there as occasional, intriguing, and frankly pleasurable titivations. During the "Felsenek" time we had a driver named André who in some ways was my hero, even something of a father-figure. He appeared to be unflappable, he was or seemed level-headed and shrewd, and especially he could do legerdemain with coins of the primitive sort that Hollywood still finds cute.

      One day I told André to roll a sewing hoop over a square-cut log laid on an open septic tank in back of the house and he looked at me and said: "You want me to do this so the hoop will fall in the crap and I'll be fired, right?" That I wasn't too disappointed must mean I knew his limitations and he was right in suspecting as much, although I did not want to see him fired. That wasn't true at all because he was married to one of our maids and I was in love with her.

      Whether love at first sight is possible or not could be argued endlessly in one of those debates consisting in "yes" and "no", which is the great majority of them, but I can vouch for one thing and that is eternal love, by which I mean from childhood to death, for my love for Carmen was so determinant that all my "wives"--these quotes will become clear gradually--have been in different ways "copies" of her. Don't ask me how I know, but I know it.

      Imagine your unforgettable childhood sweetheart, give no heed to reality and idealize her in any way you want, and that was Carmen, and the wonder of my childhood love was that it came with intense desire and sophisticated sexual fantasies and dreams in which eating fried eggs from her vagina was the least inventive. If some years later I feigned ignorance about sex and an astounded classmate took the trouble of explaining to me the secrets of erections and penetrations it must have been because I was curious to see how he would go about it, for, in the balance of my life, observing has been my one great passion, so much so that, despite superficial appearances, my intention in writing these memoirs has as much to do with the witnessing of history as it does with my own vicissitudes.

      Since I imagined Carmen through and through and desired every inch of her, you can easily understand how it would be impossible for me to have wanted André fired. Because I felt he was like my father, my love for Carmen would have me fantasizing about my own mother. But then I was an ingenue and from what happened in later years I know I can only entertain the most intense feelings of repugnance about incest. I should qualify this. For reasons that will soon out, I acquired a panic fear of maternal incest and to the day my mother died I was incapable of physical tenderness with her--despite the emotional leverage with which she could make me cry simply by mentioning the hotels in which the Antihypatus dumped us--but I had no compunctions about pretty female cousins, especially if they were young enough not to know what friendly kitchen games could lead to.

My uncle Gilbert becomes a millionaire by peddling "fossil water" and gathers a tribelet around him to cure his sexual dysfunctions

Eventually of course we moved and André and Carmen were let go. The Antihypatus got him a job as policeman and the next time I saw him, proud as could be in his grey kakhi uniform with black leggings and belt and shoulder strap, armed with nightstick and holstered pistol, my disillusionment was so complete I didn't even talk to him. It didn't occur to me then but it has just now that the Antihypatus could have sensed my feelings for him and wanted to demean him in my eyes. Yet why would a chauffeur be superior to a cop? Perhaps it was due to all those stories about Tyrannos Vincent, recounted to me as if they were mere facts, curious even weird, but interpreted by me, when I believed them, as shocking breaches of decency and justice, which is why I said before I was a sucker for propaganda. But then these speculations are based on insights and feelings the Antihypatus was not likely to have experienced himself, so I cannot actually say he got André his work as cop to spite me. As to Carmen, my love for her, despite her devotion to André, was unflagging, but she was working for my uncle the Taxiarch, whom I hated, and his house, although next door to ours, was offlimits to me and I only got occasional glimpses of Carmen, enough to keep stimulating my young hormonal flows.

      Besides Carmen during the "Felsenek" period, there are other pleasurable memories. That was the best time for my uncle Gilbert, a tall, silver-haired, handsome man, not devoid of shrewdness--he came into some money with a water well he industrialized as "fossil water", which it was, although it also came out of all the fawcets in the city--but so pathologically shy he was probably impotent. He kept up appearances by means of a girl friend with a mustache thicker than Frida Kahlo's whom he led on for at least two decades. She was so unattractive--though not really bad-looking; it was just her stiffness and old-fashioned ways--he apparently believed that he wasn't doing her a disservice by co-opting her without the intention of ever marrying her. Gilbert was in top form when I was a tad and I will never forget how much I enjoyed his buffo bullfight act in front of our house using his coat as a cape and an immobile cow with a cactus stuck to its haunch as a bull. Years later Gilbert gathered a small tribe of Amerindians whom he adopted as his family. It could be that it was only with people much below his own means that Gilbert could get it up.

      His real family, on my mother's side of my own, looked down on the poor beggars and accused them of wanting his money, which as it happened was exactly the other way around. When Gilbert started showing signs of senile dementia, they finally pried him loose from his tribelet and moved him to the house of one of his sisters--the one who engineered my parents' marriage--whose daughter subsequently either faked his signature or led his hand--they claimed he had Parkinson's but the way he played along with their games like making him dance like a bear shows clearly that he was the victim of Alzheimer's--and then had a lawyer accomplice serve him with trumped up summonses for litigations which eventually consumed all his capital.

      Sex was a very private domain and I missed out on such thrills as reciprocal genital fondling and the semen-spitting contests from tree branches that boys my age organized in those times, as I later learned, which made me understand retrospectively that my family's transhumant way of life had some advantages after all. This by the way is also proof positive that for some things it is definitely better late and never.

      Thinking back, despite my romantic and libidinal precocities, my greatest sources of satisfaction were probably intellectual. As far as I can remember I always wanted to read and I learned to early on under the violence-prone Jesuits in the witch-haunted Andean village, which, I did not say so before, had these frequent cold radiant mornings when, while clouds gathered somewhere for their afternoon onslaught, the sun lit up the snowy peaks so seemingly close I tried to ruffle them with my fingertips.

      I would go to class with a hard-leather school bag crammed with the cheap adventure or romantic novelettes scrounged up somewhere whose codes I so much wanted to crack. But this too was very private and there was in class a German bully--I have no idea how he landed in that remote valley--who once tried to force me to show him what my bag contained. I have forgotten what it was that so embarrassed me, whether the cheap reading stuff or that maybe I would have to admit I couldn't read it once I brought it out or maybe also that the other guy knew and just wanted to have some fun at my expense and I suspected his intentions, but when bully-boy started grabbing at my bag I pushed him back and he got up and I came out swinging and he beat what is aptly called a hasty retreat.

      It was one of those mornings like I just described, the world was at war, and I couldn't have been more exhilarated if I had single-handedly liberated France, for I knew then--credit the Antihypatus and even the detested Taxiarch--exactly on which I side I was. The Taxiarch however had been formed in a milieu in which pro-German tendencies were strong and he had even visited Berlin and basked in German orderliness even after Kristallnacht. My particular victory, precious though it was, had an untoward consequence in that I adopted as a rule the charging-mad, swinging or flailing arms type of attack and later in Hellhole High Boarding School it was to be of little use when I had to confront truly mean bullies, although my first opponent was not small by any means and the disproportion in our sizes made my triumph all the sweeter.

      Sweeter still was the feeling of power I had when I read right through my first sentence. Reading and I were made for each other. I didn't even need lessons in grammar. I already knew everything there was to reading and declaiming. It was as if full stops and commas were communicating with me: "Hey, big fellow, here we are and we are talking to you and telling you where to make a small pause and where to make a large pause and most importantly when a pause encloses a complete sentence and when a sentence is the end of a paragraph and when a text comes to its conclusion, and so on". Semicolons weren't too expressive and I still use them sparingly--it's as if they had been invented for Proust by metaphysical poets and philosophers--but colons were the epitome of logic and conversely I tend to overuse them although never in a context that would not be self-explanatory.

      I was so proud of my reading ability I felt there was no challenge in the world I could not face and I was miffed to say the least when the Marists offered to advance me various grades up from first and the Antihypatus chose then of all times to be pedagogical and invoke some obscure theory that must have been in vogue, totally baseless and soon to be universally discredited, about not rushing children in their education. No wonder I refused to recite some verses so puerile I immediately qualified them as infra dig but could not bring the Antihypatus and Parakomeimenos around to my perfectly sensible view. The public flogging he later gave me at the Marist School might have been his way of getting back at me for showing him up for the arrogant fool he was. My mother in her sworn state of perennial overwhelment could not or would not distinguish between plain common sense and the Antihypatus' capricious rantings, except when she knew she had the power and he was treading the line between her and other women.

      Later on, when he wasn't around, I jumped grades like the frogs in "Thumbellina" did lily ponds but this resulted in that I rushed through fractions and had trouble with mathematics, a potential object of love which I foolishly discarded. This was to be so regrettable and I would lose so much self-esteem that I stooped to seeking distraction in Amiel, a Swiss intellectual who made a minor ruckus by keeping track in his diary of his daily masturbations. A Spanish psychiatrist, who normally would be warning his younger patients that jacking off made hair grow on their palms, took it upon himself to explain Amiel as the anti-Don Juan and these arguments so depressed me that I stumbled on the concept of neurosis, but this is of the essence in this story and merits an ampler treatment, as do Spanish academics, among whom my favorite is the one who argued that El Greco suffered from a form of strabismus which elongated bodies and faces like taffy. Brilliant!

The man with the bones exposed told me: "You should have seen the other guy before they buried him"

Getting back to my childhood some time after I learned to read, we also lived in a house called "Picardie". It had a huge twisty cashew tree from which we harvested the nuts and roasted them in tin cans over wood fires. The back yard gave on a field of sesame which no one but me ever trod and all I did was scatter the iguanas underfoot and pry the fragile shells open and pour the tiny seeds into my mouth. They were tasty but hardly enough to be satisfying, like the sweetness of hibiscus flower stems or the watery marrow of grasses.

      These small pleasures were unalloyed, yet the strongest and most durable impressions, the ones I would be most reluctant to part with, came from experiences that, in the ordinary course of events, should have been horrifying. One afternoon a foundry nearby caught fire and I could see the flames shooting out from beneath the ceiling and from windows blown away. Some one said there had been fatalities from an explosion and this made watching all the more fascinating. Another day we crossed the Straits in a small motor launch with a cabin that could barely be protected by roll down tarpaulins and on the return trip a squall came up so suddenly and with such force--it was what they call a chubasco, a name that graced an ungraceful, forgotten studio film--that to this day I do not understand how our little royal boat did not capsize.

      I was less of a Stoic when the Antihypatus on a tour to some isolated coast took me to the local clinic, a tin-roofed bare-bones affair, and allowed me to observe--I suppose this sounds better than "showed me"--a man who was recuperating, and very nicely I must say, from half a dozen savage slashings with a machete. As there was no one else in that place he probably could have boasted: "You should have seen the other guy before they buried him". I seem to remember something about "firewater", but if it was the Antihypathus' intention to put me off liquor for the rest of my life he miscalculated so badly that on New Years eve a few months later I emptied every glass my parents and their guests left lying about and had the quickest and barfiest hangover in history. The celebrations were also quickly terminated and to be honest I only regained the taste for liquor some twenty-five years later, when I took it up for a time with a vengeance.

      The name "Picardie" is associated with a cataclysmic break in my life, and in my parents' marriage, but especially, even though it happened much before, with what was possibly the best year I have ever lived, because it included the time we travelled to Europe just before the war. I can remember every detail even though in truth I remember nothing and perhaps that is what makes it so enthralling: that I know I travelled to Paris and Geneva and that I know I was perfectly and totally content and so I can embroider on what I know without the slightest hint of doubt.

      The hotel in Paris was called Belfast and from the balcony of our room it was possible to see the Arc de Triomphe. The days were hazy and cool in late spring and early summer. My first train trip was from Paris to Geneva. The Prado collection had been sent to Geneva for safekeeping and the Antihypatus took us to see it. He lingered over the Sorollas and in particular a huge canvass of boys bathing naked in a shore near Valencia. The Antihypatus was in Geneva as Apocrisiary to a conference of the Organisation Internationale du Travail, in which there were so many delegates his own group consisted of three tiny dark suits in a huge hall that from above must have seemed like a haberdashers dream come true.

      After Geneva we went back to Paris and the same hotel. My parents and their party had their photos taken in Chaillot behind props of an airplane and a pair of pugilists. They had the wit or maybe it was the photographer's suggestion to have my mother and another woman in the party put their faces in the cut-outs for the boxers' heads. Hil-ar-ious! The Antihypatus stayed on--he had friends in Brussels from his Madrid days--and we sailed on the Champlain. He himself returned on the Normandie's last voyage, before it was burned by saboteurs in a New York pier.

      It is possible I have been unfair to my father and therefore I should like to make amends, which is not to say I am going to change my tune. I am going to select some themes I would be proud of if I were he and he could tell them of himself. Unfair again? Not any more than his efforts to try to mold me into an image of what he wanted me to be, which he never thought through and probably kept changing over time without consulting me. At least I will not be tampering with the facts of his life, which he lived mainly according to a design in his head, an achievement seldom within the reach of even very powerful individuals, and he enjoyed a fair share of paybacks, even when they were provided to him by fate. Just to give two examples: the Curopalates that gave him the nickname he so detested died a penniless exile and a fat former associate during The Republic, who out of spite taunted him anonymously with the lizard thing, was struck down by a stroke at the peak of his power.

An Aryan hero's ass gets to preside over our meals much to the Apocrisiary's chagrin

What I remember most about my father are his knees. They were greyish-white and bony (not fat and baby-faced like women's knees) and they smelled clean, not of soap or perfume, just clean. I would have loved and admired him even without his Imperial Rank and responsibilities only because of his perfectly sculpted knees and I can now understand why I went on my own knees to try to bridge across his silence, not a good idea because his knees might have been perfect but like the run of mankind he thought he deserved the obeisance he got.

      The reason I went on my knees had to do with the lingering smell of excrement that surrounded me when I was near him, which was only in my mind and was begot by the Magister's rejections and my mother's insistence in thrusting me at him when still a very young child I did not have the fully competent control of my sphincter (which means I crapped on him, but only once). I took a philosophical and subtly sarcastic view of the whole thing, which means I was detached but occasionally would make subtle rapier thrusts and watch the response to calculate my next move. If he bled and I could cut again with impunity I had no compunctions.

      Like all politicians and most ambassadors, my father had execrable taste. Sorolla, for example, is a second-rank, very late Impressionist much over-rated in Spain and by Hispanists. There was a musty Hispanist museum in upper Manhattan, a place that so embodied the old concept of what a museum should be like (somber, cluttered, sepulchral) that if it still exists it should be preserved as a kind of mausoleum of museumhood. Apart from some suspicious looking Murillos and Grecos--the latter looked as if they had been painted by a strabic forger—it had a room full of monumental canvasses by Sorolla depicting the different regions of Spain. The Castile plateau forms the background for a bruised nag with a Quixote-like figure of a picador, and there are of course hordes of Aragonese peasants.

      The picador is supposed to represent the sore trials of idealism in a rock-hard world, which is how Spaniards used to like to read their Cervantes until the truck-farmers and inn-keepers became millionaires and what they had been reading was Hola, which offered them epicene balladeers and castanet-clacking duchesses as role models. For a time I too thought there was some subtle coded message in Don Quijote and I persisted in this idea until I read in Auerbach that the central character was plainly off his rocker and Cervantes had used him as a device to represent Spaniards as they were, which included being touchy about being represented.

      My father also liked small "sitting-room bronzes", which is the best I can do in describing them. I don't know where he picked up this particular taste, but it must also have been in Madrid, so after our Kingdom became a Republic and he was appointed Apocrisiary--even though with the fall of the Dynasts Imperial Ranks were abolished, some titles were, for some reason, retained--true to his new condition he began to collect garbage wherever he was posted. Alright, so maybe he did go out of his way with his German bronzes--he was never sent to Bonn--but in his total and absolute lack of good taste he was a true, a vocational Ambassador.

      One of the bronzes he acquired was of an Arno Becker-style naked Aryan hero about to throw a boulder which means his ass is pointing outwards as he turns slightly sideways. My father had the statuette placed over a cupboard in the dining room and one day I turned it ass-wise towards the room, which made the Magister and Apocrisiary turn purple and was the signal--thank you, God!--for me to turn him around again. After this my father must have thought either it was a dumb servant doing it or it was me and he would have to get in a row over the buttocky he-man and since either perspective seemed mildly ludicrous he resigned himself to having the Germanic heroe's ass preside over our meals. It wasn't that bad because, one, I relented the next time the bronze's position was corrected, and, two, he never was around for very long.

      My father had high social merits and he was not made an Antihypatus for nothing. Through life I have observed that even a village headman or a tribal shaman are exceptional in exactly the same way that the President of the United States or the head of the Chinese Communist Party are exceptional. My father gained his spurs during an oil workers' strike shortly after the death of King Vincent, one of those outbursts that Eleazar tolerated to make a name for himself as Dynast. He was sent to mediate and he eventually ordered the workers back to their latrines and their rigs and their redneck foremen, but he also wrote a long report which decried social conditions and resulted in general improvements. In my opinion the rednecks' bosses probably were underpaying the locals but the squalor was exclusively due to bad habits. My father's balancing act was rewarded and the spanking-new Antihypatus felt and acted like a hereditary Nobilissimus.

Economic planning is the exercise whereby you invent statistics which you later use as facts

For me his greatest act of courage was the night rumours were going around of an impending earthquake and the neighborhood went sleeping outdoors and my father said something like: "Stuff and nonsense!", and we remained nice and snug in our modest but comfortable dwelling place in the Kingdom's capital, where nights could be quite chilly. There were rumours of other things afoot but here the Antihypatus' haughtiness did not serve him well. Dynast Eleazar was succeeded by Dynast Meca. Eleazar and Meca were a study in contrasts. Lopez was the thin ascetic to Meca's fat sensualist. Eleazar was teetotal, Meca drank, some said he binged. More to the point, when Dynast Eleazar ruled the country was still amenable to autocrats. When Meca's turn came, the Kingdom was secretly seething.

      My own perceptions of history and politics were dim and mostly anecdotal, like noticing that a relative had in his den a portrait of a handsome man with a trim mustache wearing a military cap with tassels. The uniform was brown and the wearer had draped a self-evidently non-reglamentary cape over one shoulder with a coat of arms consisting of a yoke and a sheaf of arrows. I later realized that this was Franco, a pudgy general who had taken over Spain with the considerable help of destiny--the leader of the rebellion died in a plane crash--and of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

      My Falangist relative was a lover of the finer things, which should have made us buddies despite the difference in our ages, but the implications of that portrait always got in the way. One time we sat together through a recital by Gyorgy Sandor--who was either a very wise man or a mediocrity, for he absolutely refused to have any of his piano performances recorded, or so it was said--and when encore time arrived--these have always been a must in half-empty auditoria in faraway places--he played a piece by Chopin, which every one cheered enormously, and he followed that with a piece by his countryman Bartok, and both my relative and myself uttered the same expression of surprise and though we also exchanged glances I know the selection pleased me but to this day I have the suspicion that what my companion really wanted to express was dismay.

      I also learned in time that long before I was born the world was divided between the "Powers"--racist, civilized, powerful, arrogant--and the other countries, mostly dependencies and a few backward independent states. There were nuances but this book is not a political treatise. This order of political things was naturally the way the Powers saw the world. Their privileged status had emerged from a history of economic development during which, by and large, certain traits were predominant for centuries before Marx called them capitalistic. One of the Powers was patently backward and that was Russia, which had more peasants than industrial workers, but it was in Russia that, of all places, radical Marxists took power in the name of a workers' revolution.

      The Soviet project was to kill all its enemies and catch up to the other Powers before any one had time to react. Marx was a fuddled thinker and his appeal was mainly to others like him, which is just by way of saying that political talent is perfectly compatible with being intellectually handicapped. In order to catch up, the Soviets concocted five-year plans. Economic planning is the exercise whereby you invent statistics which you later use as facts. This shortcut appealed to some non-communist economists. It also appealed to politicians in the backward part of the globe. Thus was born the concept of underdevelopment, which went hand in hand with development economics, but is also shorthand for a particularly pertinacious form of "collective neurosis" and is one of the reasons it gets such a big play in these confessions.

      World War II turned "elevation" into an art. There was a lot of "elevated" rhetoric about freedom and equality and the message was unambiguous to the ambitious, who everywhere after the war held the triumphant Powers to their word. I knew who the victors were because I heard the Antihypatus say that the Allies had taken Paris and the war was over. 

      While the world fought, in our little Kingdom there were two groups inimical to Dynasts: opposition Politicians and Young Military. The Politicians had imbibed the principles of development economics and had their eyes on the oil which the wells were pumping fast to sustain the effort to defeat the Axis. They couldn't be faulted for this since even Meca and his chamberlains believed in stimulated, planned growth.

      The ambitious Young Military also were believers, but they were willing to believe anything if it helped them lay their hands on power. They were crude and ungrateful, and both for the same reason: that they had been sent by the Dynasts to study in backward military academies abroad where what they learned was how to stage coups d'états.

      According to the version of lead Politico Romulus, the Military told him they were going to overthrow Meca and invited him to join the plot. Romulus said he thought he was witnessing a fait accompli and decided to join forces with the Military, not a wise choice as we shall see. When the revolution started, Meca had a hangover and the Antihypatus was preparing an electoral campaign for the government, which shows how clueless he was. Meca chose not to fight--as who would with a head like a Stakhanovite beehive--and he was exiled and all the ranks from Antihypatus up, my father of course among them, were arrested.

      During the "revolution" itself armed civilians cruised the streets in pick-ups, waving flags and brandishing their weapons at bystanders, who naturally chorused: "Viva viva". To my uncontrollable mirth our house had been targeted for sacking, so we moved to the house of my aunt and future lover. But the situation wasn't as laughable or harmless as it seemed and my Francoist relative refused to obey one of those revolutionary patrols and was shot, appropriately enough, in the right buttock.

      The Kingdom was abolished and The Republic proclaimed. Development planning was officially instituted and the government immediately proceeded to recruit any one who could read and write into the ranks of the new bureaucracy. The country ipso facto became democratic and developed, but for the sake of appearances, especially since 95% of the population was illiterate, the official discourse was that we were a "developing economy", not entirely off target as it denoted hopeless confusion.

The Taxiarch harrowed people with his description of tiny brollys stuck up his urethra

As to my father, he was confined in an officer's room in a military barracks, where I visited him and as was my wont ignored him ignoring me and so I became friendly with the guard at the door armed with a wondrous looking sword. When no one was looking, he took it out of its sheath and I saw that it was all hilt and guard and maybe three inches of blade, just enough so that it held inside the scabbard.

      My father was later released, shorn of rank of course, but he quickly found work--he was when all is said and done an intelligent and resourceful lawyer--with people who had been friendly to the Dynasts but preferred making money to being ministers of state, a patently sage decision. His services were well rewarded and as soon as he could barely afford it he exiled my mother and me to America.

      I wasn't entirely unfamiliar with culture clash. My first inkling of it came through our relations with my uncle the Taxiarch. He was a short distinguished-looking fellow--he and my father descended from immigrant Scotsmen, possibly too runty to feel at home with skirt-wearing log-throwers--who did well early in life and was rich when most every one else in our Kingdom was dreaming of their first pair of tire-soled espadrilles, the national footwear. He had married an attractive, sweet girl from an old traditional family of little means and the two were childless. Unlike the Antihypatus the Taxiarch was not the mistress-having sort. He was entirely faithful to his wife, whom he loved dearly. However, during the time when he was making his fortune, he had been a frequenter of brothels and an avid user of prostitutes, from whom he got the clap many times. He used to harrow people with his description of tiny brollys stuck up his urethra to flush out infection (bullshit, if you ask me now, but very impressive in the telling then). Anyway, with that background, he gallantly took the blame for their childlessness.

      When I was grown and got to know the Taxiarch's petite wife she seemed to me a gentle soul, a bit of an airhead, totally devoted to her shallow husband, but when I think back and do a quick mathematical calculation it appears to me that she must have been as frivolous as a harem star. The Taxiarch gratified her every whim and the best she could do with her time was collect cats. I was told she accumulated a feline century, but I only remember a one-eyed black-and-tan and a fluffed up, snow-white Angora in a perennial state of total torpor, maybe due to old age or the heat. She also had a monkey named Pepito, whom she kept confined to a large tree in her backyard with a generously long chain attached to a belt around the monkey's waist, just above his crotch and amazingly human-like pudenda. It was in part due to this zoological experience that, despite my religious education and basic knowledge of the Pentateuch, I had no problem in discarding creationism as a doctrine fit only for dodoes.

      Being neighbors to the Taxiarch was only mildly educational and hugely demeaning. This was around the time I was given the despicable badminton set. My mother's pride had mostly been sucked out by her dismal matrimonial feat, so when it was decreed that we, and particularly me, were not to be allowed entry into the Taxiarch's house for fear that we could scuff its sparkling, waxed tiled floors, we meekly complied, or rather, my mother did, because I was always on the prowl to see if I could sneak in but it was usually well guarded with servants and I only managed glimpses which confirmed the reports about the floors and revealed the even more awesome sight of carved, dark-mahogany furniture and gleaming copper candelabra. More importantly, what I wanted was to sneak glances at Carmen, who was then in the Taxiarch’s employ, but she was complicit with the rest of the staff, although I did not hold it against her because she turned me away reluctantly and it was either doing that or getting the boot.  

      The point is that between our house--architecturally a replica of my uncle's--and his house there was a social distance as immeasurable as that between heaven and earth. The only advantage we had was having for neighbour on the other side a place where strange things happened such as the murmur of prayers and the sight of candles in the middle of the night whereas the Taxiarch's mansion occupied a corner site. I had enough experience of witches to know souls were not sent to purgatory as to a hotel where you could occasionally taxi to the world of mortals, but it did provoke a frisson to suspend disbelief for reasonably short whiles.

Culture clash was like saying that a hanged man got a neck massage

Culture clash became explicit when the Taxiarch and his wife removed to New York not long before the revolution in our Kingdom and our new neighbours were a family whose parterfamilias was an American. Before getting to them, I would like to do some justice to the Taxiarch, which if it is anything like the spotty job I did with my father doesn't augur well for him.

      I did not like him, I never did, and my memories of him are tinged with disdain. My father's personality was molded to a considerable extent by his brother. I am sure that the differences between our houses could have been less pronounced, but the Antihypatus chose not to compete in that area with his brother. Here I am feeling about, but I think I know enough of human reactions to infer that the Antihypatus had cause for gratitude, that the Taxiarch wanted recognition for his generosity, and that the Antihypatus was too proud to give it, and just to show the Taxiarch that he didn't give a fig for his values he chose to live in comparative poverty. What's more, even though an Imperial Rank and political radicalism were incompatible, he also made a show of his socialist leanings, but it was towards the dainty "socialism" of development economics and it would have been harmless except for having infected me, who went and overdid it as if I had symptons of a stomach ulcer and downed a glass of hydrochloric acid. He would have done well to have paid more heed to the Taxiarch, who knew more about the world than the Antihypatus ever would, an admission on my part which goes a long way to explaining why I disliked my uncle and why I could be so stubborn I was probably the only person who could drive him up a tree, like his wife's Pepito when I tried to grab him by the neck before he could bite me.

      The Pigreens were our new neighbors. I remember red-headed Panky, about my age and size, but not his parents, which means I either never saw them--I remember her cats and her monkey but I don't recollect seeing the Taxiarch's wife at the time--or I saw them and promptly forgot them. To my young suspicious mind their marriage was a form of reprehensible cultural miscegenation and I was very scornful when Panky told me his father's car was a Buick (long u) and I explained to him explicitly and irrevocably that Buick was pronounced Buick with a short u, as in tweak or squeak. Panky just scratched his head for he was probably in the throes of his own biculturalism. The irony is that over the years while I became more and more estranged from my own seedbed he became a respectable and prosperous citizen of The Republic with only the faintest links to his father's country.

      But that was not the case when I met Panky, which means that when I was uprooted to Manhattan after the revolution in our Kingdom to say that I experienced culture shock is like saying that a hanged man was given a neck massage. This was a change I had not been prepared for--save for some stories I naturally contemned about some monstrous edifice called the Empire State Building--and my mother was not even up to coping with it. Over the years, her repertoire of certainties had not grown by much and our impending move was to cast a pall of doubt on what little she had accumulated. But in all honesty the shock was not per se bad, as I will strive to show in the next episode of my memoirs.

I get to meet Joe Canvassback, the famous heavyweight, an experience that leads to a lamentable misunderstanding with my namesake Chuck Hercules

I was duly humbled by the skyscrapers--back home the tallest construction was the water tower--and I discovered American cheese sandwiches and homogenized milk, so different from our oversalted white cheeses and the raw, water-laced milk that grew a sticky skin-like film on top when boiled. Culture shock was ultimately based on ignorance as when the Taxiarch, who was living in the Great Stars Hotel on 57th street, introduced me to the great fighter Joe Canvassback. Canvassback was the owner of the place but apparently he was always hanging about like a lounge lizard or the hotel dick to impress the guests and the tourists. The Taxiarch thought he would wow me or something by introducing me to Canvassback but, like Panky, all I did was scratch my head. However, the man's huge paw did impress me and that led to another incident which can also serve to illustrate my befuddlement about the situation I had been thrown into without my consent or liking.

      I felt like a 45-pound weakling and I was always casting glances at these ads about a man who pulled a train wagon with a rope in his teeth. This was obvious nonsense, but if he dared to make such a claim, there must have been something to his promise that he could turn anybody into an Olympic weight-lifter. The reasoning should have been the other way around, but inexperience here also played a powerful hand. Thus it was that I finally got up the nerve to fill in a little form from a magazine and send it to Chuck "Hercules" (another phony giveaway my cultural innocence prevented me from discovering).

      His response was overwhelming: he called me Charlie "his namesake", he said we would get on famously, he promised to make me a real he-man, and finally he got to the point, which was I had to cough up something in the vicinity of $30 dollars, which I did not have. I thought I would sneak out of this budding friendship by not answering, but Mr. "Hercules" not only grew insistent, as if the little form I sent him had been a blood-contract, but he also ticked me off properly.

      My reaction was shame and I should have thrown his letters in the wastepaper basket unopened but as there was also a sense of self-importance--and maybe the chance of a discount--I kept opening them as they arrived which was not too bad because without the slightest hint about its implications for my future studies I observed the human mind at work as I had observed the wonders of evolution in Pepito many years before I heard of Darwin. As to "Hercules", I eventually realized the poor bugger was struggling--getting underweight juveniles like me to write to him was probably proving harder than faking the wagon-pulling prowess--as well as that I was not meant to have bulging biceps and adbominal quilts.

The perfect purity of my state of anomie and my unfortunate experiences in the 20th century

None of that relieved the dreariness of our economic straits. We lived in a crowded boarding house on 181st street. For fun we visited the waxed-up corpse of Mother Mary Cabrini nearby. Automats were Jewish restaurants inspired by Lang's Metropolis in which you put quarters in slots and took out of steel-bright compartments dishes of food placed there by unseen gnomes. They were always good for a bout of wonderment until the day I saw the gnomes were a horde of beefy scullions in white kitchen get-up moving about like automatons, which is probably how these restaurants got their name. Everything was mostly so dreary our visits to the Taxiarch midtown were an exercise in sado-masochism and one of the reasons my detestation of him grew in intensity as time went by, a sentiment I must add which was extended to New York itself and lasted until they gentrified Amsterdam Avenue, when I gave in.

      Our circumstances in the boarding house were so strained--most of the boarders were male and had their eyes on my mother--that we finally moved to a tenement, a real-to-goodness tenement with dim hanging light bulbs, sooty walls, and windows giving on fire escapes. Here we had more privacy but fires were so common in the neighborhood that, unlike living in the boarding house, which was six floors up and seemed as if sealed from the world, we heard fire sirens going off constantly at night and I lived in dread of being roasted alive.

      The ex-Antihypatus, now up-and-coming corporate Lawyer, visited us once in our dingy premises and all I got for what I was going through in that God-forsaken caricature of Dante's Inferno was something like: "But..but...this boy has not learned any English", after what? maybe a couple of months in which I was attending a public school where the domestic language of most of my fellow students was Yiddish and I not only had to learn a barbarous irrational tongue in which the u was really pronounced as in Buick but was also supposed to swallow the oversized pride with which I had told old Panky just what sort of an ignoramus he was.

      My father must have taken pity for shortly afterwards he moved us to a rented house in Miami, which to me was only a very relative improvement. I had the suspicion that our new situation would not be better than the previous one of instability and violence to which now was added having to go on adapting to a place where people did not know how to read correctly and whose vocabulary had a tendency to monosyllabism, whereas I knew every civilized polysyllabic term they occasionally and reluctantly employed, probably incorrectly.

      That the instability was not going to change became evident when a few months later we moved to a new house, much better than the one we had been renting, which was to be my place of residence for the next three years, but not as if it was a permanent home, for, one, I hated Miami so much I longed for any opportunity to travel and, two, no matter how hard I tried there were too many obstacles in the way of my cultural assimilation. As nevertheless I gradually became alienated from my own birthplace, a process that culminated in the barbarities I witnessed at Hellhole High, what eventually obtained in me was the perfect purity of the state of anomie, a name I learned years later at Kings and slapped my forehead at my utter ignorance of what I was, and the condition of spectator of the historical events that occupied the decades of the twentieth century I was fortunate or unfortunate to be alive in.

      In the few years I lived in Miami I remember two trips to The Republic, two summers in a ridiculous place called Cloudmont Camp, and an absolutely marvelous car trip to Mexico City unfortunately marred by its premature conclusion and a long interminable trekk to a place called Slagville, where I was, after the delights of the Mexican voyage, miserable and apathetic. With its wide tree-lined boulevards and its huge zócalo and imposing cathedral, Mexico City was to me like paradise but I haven't the slightest notion where my father got Slagville, a small town, not ugly despite its name, but nothing special either, surrounded by puny, piny hills which compared to Popocatepetl or Ixtaccihuatl were like getting the kick from first class to a standing-room-included, overcrowded charter flight. Considering wetbacks and NAFTA and the rest, all of this just has to have some ironical connotation, but I haven't figured it out yet. The return to Miami I cannot describe except as total ennui.

      Cloudmont Camp occupied the Alabama side of a mountain more famous for being near Chattanooga. There were many things to do in camp, like scouring the grounds for flint arrowheads probably planted in the hundreds at the begining of each season by the camp counselors, or watching grown men twist wrought-iron bars into lamps in the shape of the camp logo, which they then gave the bored campers and said things like: "My, that's a great lamp you just made there!" I was candidate one year for best camper, but I spoiled my chances by ragging an idiot--who cannot have been that much of an idiot since he got his revenge by snitching on me--and I was strong candidate for best athlete (honestly!) which didn't work out because I told a counselor who was umpiring a baseball game he needed eyeglasses and kicked dust on his shoes.

I get caught banging a rabbit and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers fall into the orchestra pit

My curious relationship with retards calls for an explanation and I want to have it out once and for all. Normally I am a sucker for underdogs. Even years after I lost my socialist faith I cannot hear the words of the "International"--"Unite, pariahs of the Earth! Sing out, thou legion of the starved! Join voices in the chorus of the International!"--without having tears well up in my eyes. It's ridiculous because I feel only contempt for Marx and I am not a Jew, although I may look like one, which is not saying much because it is only Jews who still claim there is such a thing as a Jewish genotype, a patently racist reflex which is smothered in the clamour, now mostly in the form of litigation, about the Holocaust.

      If there are underdogs in this world, they have to be retarded children and so it is inexplicable that my attitude towards their misfortune should consist in pieties from the mouth outwards and that my real feelings should be of irritation and impatience. Physically, I would not even dream of raising my hand to a retard. The closest I came to a physical reaction was the temptation to have sex with a neighborhood girl who lived in trees and rooftops and went about near naked and knew she could arouse males--basically, she looked normal and probably had a rebellious streak and a low IQ, and maybe not even this--and once managed to arouse me until I paused and said: "Whoa, there, young man!" So I have asked myself over and over: "why these feelings about half-wits?", but I am afraid I cannot add "until I finally discovered..." I have the suspicion that I was much like them and that my irritation and impatience was not greater than what I would feel towards a big bore with an IQ of 550.

      On one occasion I tried to pull the wool over an idiot in a game I badly wanted to win, but he hollered and people arrived and it ended in my having to lie and being made fun of by everybody, so you could say, in sum, that in my battles with retards, the retards have won every time, although I probably have good grounds for my belief that I am in some way (maybe many ways) like them even if I cannot stand them. This sounds like powerful self-hatred and it should surprise no one as I am as misanthropic as they come, much more so than Molière's petulant anti-hero, who did not, as I do, extend misanthropy to himself.

      On the other hand, there may be another reason why I harbour feelings of solidarity with spastics and it has to do with a syllogism that goes like this: retards are exceptional; I am exceptional; I am a retard. It's not impeccable, but it has strong undercurrents which in the subconscious wear down the rough edges, especially if you consider the cryptorchidism, and the sterility that went with it, a fact I had not mentioned before so as not to make me seem too exceptional, for if truth be said I am probably not that different from the rest of my fellow humans.

      Trips to The Republic were a relief from the monotony of Miami. Besides, things always happened that were either unexpected in themselves or to which I gave a tinge of sentiment. We usually rented rooms and in one house I was caught fondling a girl and there was a big hullaballo as if I had been found fucking a rabbit. On another occasion, we lived in what was in effect an attic but a huge one with rooms above a very high ceiling and a terrific spiral staircase. It was on this same trip that violence flared once more and I realized I was not quite at home as I wanted to believe.

      Violence hadn't ever stopped. In the public school in Upper Manhattan I got into a fight with a boy over a crumpled piece of paper he took from my hand without asking my permission. Maybe he did but I couldn't understand a word he was saying. Then I saw the newspaper vendor sprawled dead in the street after a car slammed into him. The fire engines could be heard over many blocks, but there were also fires nearby and I caught the fag end of one. Even though there was no one around looking despondent, I commiserated with the dispossessed and refused to believe the idle talk about arson and fire being cheaper than a wrecking ball.    I had developed a strong propensity for compassion and I had not yet learned the wisdom of Zweig's title-phrase Beware of Pity. It was an almost pathological tendency to empathize with the unfortunate, or where I thought I perceived misfortune, and to feel embarrassment for others, as when I saw a ballroom dancing act--they used to have shows before movies in that time--which for me was hilarious only in retrospect. The couple came out doing a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers routine in full ballroom attire but before they twirled around three times they fell into the orchestra pit and while they were going on with their antics--which were only really funny when they tumbled the first time--I was squirming because I believed they were a pair of incompetents trying to make the best of an embarrassing situation.

Lardbucket sandbags me and I obtain the clear understanding that I am not a fish

On the question of real if not life-endangering violence, back in The Republic during a vacation I was minding my own business when a gang of young hoodlums began jeering at me because I was wearing short pants. The intelligent reaction should have been to give them the finger or the stronger Italian elbow-bending "vai fangullo" gesture, or even just shouted at them that I used short pants to make it easier for them to play with my big tool, but no, I had to be the hero--no wonder I fell so easily for the Quixote-as-idealist imposture!--and walked to where these five hooligans were--I was quaking but not about to turn and run after I went into my fearless-warrior role--and when I got to where they stood in a row I asked: "Now, which of one you is doing the shouting?" Amazingly, these five jerks must have been as afraid of our confrontation as I was because none spoke up, and then I made a tactical error: I picked on the smallest of the group and this gave the biggest one the chance to whack me and I whacked back and it became a brawl in which I got whacked more often than I whacked, but considering the odds the episode must be counted as a moral victory and I don't remember being more than mildly bruised physically, but internally I began to have my doubts about whether I had anything in common with such yahoos.

      My cultural-identity dilemma consisted in that I was not making much progress in adapting back in Miami either. My first day at school I met the Latinos there. Miami then didn't have Cubans coming out of the woodwork and we were only a few at our school: myself, Tomás the Spaniard, Chico the Portorican, and a fat dummy whose name I don't remember but should have been Lardbucket. Chico became my best friend and he wasn't around when Tomás, who was only a half-hearted sort of bully, started picking on me and naturally I riposted in the style that had so cowed the German boy years before and Tomás began to backpedal but then Lardbucket sandbagged me, literally, and both just sat on me until I stopped swinging.

      I cannot say I was fighting all the time, not in a physical sense anyway. I cannot even claim that I felt completely alienated. It was just that I did not know what I was supposed to be doing where I was. It felt as if I had fallen into the sea: I knew I had to swim, and I did of course, but that didn't mean I was a fish or had to become one. I kept looking for the boat that would come to rescue me. I did not know whether I was supposed to become a loyal American or whether I had been sent to train as a future spy or fifth-columnist and in class when the Oath of Allegiance was recited I joined in or abstained ad libitum. This gave me a sense of individuality and even of power, but not of belonging or of integration, and I again got into the habit of refusing, which means that the whipping I got from my father in the Marist school had only partially wringed it out of me.

      My mother wasn't even swimming. She was treading water. Sometimes it was difficult just being with her because I knew she discounted I would be there for her to lean on and mostly I was but it didn't mean I liked being a stanchion. On one occasion we had excess baggage and an airline clerk was telling her with a wink he was going to overlook it and she insisted on paying and I wanted the earth to swallow me but I stood my ground. That was one of the most noble and self-sacrificing acts of loyalty I have ever performed. But she never thanked me for it and all I got was a sense of shared responsibility for totally cretinous behavior I had nothing to do with.

      One of the ways she took me for granted was casually exposing herself and this, combined with the night in Mexico she lay next to me and embraced me from the back and started shaking like our dog Duck when I let him on my leg, determined in me some complex attitudes about allowing her ever to touch me, or get near me. I didn't sleep at all that night even after she left and went back to the room where she and the Lawyer were supposed to stay and not prowl like sex-starved ghosts. It was the worst night of my life and I've had some whoppers. It also complicated things sexual for me far beyond the complexities of my previous one-sided passions. This was around the time I induced Chico to tell me about the birds and the bees. Perhaps I was hoping he would reveal some secret as heavy and fascinating as those I carried and dared not expose.

      Among the complications were such paradoxes as the big fuss my mother made over a porno-cartoon I had hidden under my mattress in which Dagwood is putting on a condom on his log-sized penis as Blondie waits legs spread. I thought and still think it was very educational and I failed to see what her shock and her scolding were about. She threatened me with telling my father and I could have riposted, but didn't, with the night in Mexico.

      The uttered and unuttered threats were empty anyway because the Lawyer was with us so infrequently I can only remember them as chances for me to cross him by acting very stupid, like the time he brought me this resplendent ring with The Republic's coat of arms in various shades of gold and I went that very afternoon and "accidentally" lost it in the beach at Matheson Hammock; or when he insisted I practice golf with him and I swung an iron so hard it flew like an amputated boomerang glowing in the reflector lights of the range before the astonished players and I fled to the car and locked myself in. What I am saying is that it was war and I didn't exactly have the best equipped army. I thought will power--what the French call cran, and almost got them beat before they started in August 1914--would compensate, but it tended to backfire, as when I had a falling out with Chico, much older than me and a very good ball player, and I challenged him to a game in which my team performed in a manner that would have made Charlie Brown's seem like a World Series contender.

I had to wade through a mass of other juveniles shouting and picking their boogers, who became deathly silent but for the rhythmic, muffled beatings when Hedy Lamarr naked as Venus began chasing a horse

Understandably, I was keen on evasions, and I found them in cinemas. I saw so many films that even after a lifetime's expertise I still come across some forgotten picture from that time which produces memory twitches and soon comes into focus. Titles I will forget but not plots nor to my shame stars's names. I say shame because I hated and still hate "fans", even though hard knocks over time have taught me to show some respect for people who can learn scripts, do convincing imitations of life, and still manage to look superhuman.

      As usual the memorable occasions were few in the wholeness of life, but some do stick in the mind with abundance of details. One of these was going to see Ecstasy and having to wade through a mass of other juveniles shouting and picking their boogers and then putting up with their constant chatter until they became deathly silent but for the rhythmic, muffled beatings when Hedy Lamarr walked in her birthday attire out of a pond and then scurried through a meadow chasing a horse. I was reminded of this occasion when years later I went to see Les aimants in a cinema in a very demotic neigborhood. The place was empty but for maybe ten yokels and me, and they were deathly silent until one of them couldn't resist shouting: "Look, he's going down on her!", but with a much less aseptic choice of words.

      Although I was indiscriminate about the films I saw--there were no massive paperbacks and weeklies then with incomprehensible synopses and subtle classifications such as "must see" and "don't see"--the sheer numbers was invaluable in helping me pick my way to what I wanted to see and what I wanted to avoid. But this would come later for at that time there might have been three or at most four releases a week--not like now when the only thing that's not filmed is maybe a cat fight, which would be socially incorrect--and I had no choice but to take the good with the bad.

      Good was Roland Gilbert plucking a guitar in a tunnel being dug under a cemetery in Havana to put a bomb under a dictator's ass. Bad were musicals. Busby Berkeley (that's his real name as far as I know) was retired or dead and the sheer overwhelming vulgarity of his work had been replaced by cute hoofer Kelly dethroning diffident, elegant Astaire. Bad were most studio-made films, and since most were, at least in seeing so much rubbish I got to the point where I could smell it and even predict it.

      Some movies which I hated, such as Harvey, later made me laugh wantonly, and some directors I was rapturous about, like Frank Capra, later seemed like phonies, Capra especially in the movie A Wonderful Life in which the character played by James Stewart is so dense that after gawking over and over at the weird changes in his hometown, it is only about the hundredth gawk that he begins to suspect that something really strange has happened to him. It is a tiresome film and ironically the only one that has become a holiday ritual in America, so that its absence on television during Christmas would be as if the Viennese were not treated to the Trisch-trasch Polka on New Years Eve, which would surely make them throw up their Sacher Torte.

      Eventually my early experience as a film-buff left me with three convictions: that all movies are fabrications, that they are metaphorical, and that they reflect and reinforce social prejudices. A corollary of the first principle is that if you see a good movie one too many times you'll see through it, as happened to me with Twelve Angry Men. In the case of the Third Man, I am close to disillusionment but not yet there, and On the Waterfront I haven't seen again, after easily ten times, because I don't want to destroy all my old fetishes, which brings to mind that if I know so much about movies and still watch them it could be because my tentative proposition about being an idiot-hating idiot must be true, although I must say that, at one point during the composition of these confessions, I did discover one reason at least why I am still addicted to such a seemingly moronic form of entertainment.

      The only reality that movies have, but that hardly insignificant, is that they are always on a bandwagon--like first closing all psychiatric hospitals and then executing their former inmates--although they do not create but follow social trends. Maybe I have always watched films because I am fascinated by images moving on a screen. Maybe every one is. But if my basic film-viewing impulse was akin to what motivated early film-makers when they recorded locomotives entering train stations and horses going through their paces and other such unrousing events, the impact that movies had on my existence was not negligible, for they were the complement of my refusals in affording me glimpses of things I wanted to do and, I truly believed, would in time actually do, so strictly speaking I was not another daydreaming Walter Mitty but a potential Don Juan, Beau Geste, and the reclusive but brilliant and bilingual B.Traven (the author of The Treasure of Sierra Madre) rolled into one.

I would bongo away at any woody surface until my fingers were purple or some one, any one, even our maid Dora, cried: "Stop! Please! Stop!"

Normally, the films I saw in Miami were those showing in three cinemas on Flagler Street, but on two occasions at least I went off the beaten path and both times with my mother, who took me to see a Mexican tear-jerker-cum-brothel-drama called Hypocrite--I still remember the music and some scenes, perhaps because it was shortly before or shortly after the memorable trip to Mexico--and more significantly, and surprisingly (I still cannot imagine how she got the idea), a filming of Verdi's Il Trovatore. The sets were crummy--probably those that the Marx brothers did not demolish in A Night at the Opera--but the music was stupendous and I was enthralled, although it would take a beating by the cops and an expulsion from a boarding school before I would take to music with a passion that was religious in its intensity and absolute benightedness.

      Although films probably exhausted their capacity to surprise me, there is a mystery in my experience of them that I have neither the expectation nor the real desire to see solved and that concerns a series so surreal it can show up Buñuel as a faultless and routinary logician. The hero was a lion-tamer, played by a guy named Snap Briskly, who might have learned his act in Lublin and was certainly not called that by his parents, who would transit from whipping in an oversized birdcage some lackadaisical felines, maybe even stuffed and animated through cutting, to adventures in which Roman soldiers had wings and stood guard from dark caves on a preposterous assortment of cardboard miniatures. I imagine the series were for distribution in the Amazon basin and the roofless cinemas in our little Kingdom and that they were thrown away after the sprocket holes began to tear and the splicing had reduced them to about 100 feet of incoherent pantomime.

      There were other forms of evasion but they were definitely minor. My mother's musical culture was more or less restricted to Lara, the Mexican king of romantic song, and Gardel, the Argentine emperor of tango, which is why I still wonder about going to see the Il Trovatore movie. As to the Antihypatus, the only piece I ever heard him mentioning was the "Beer Barrel Polka", so there were no restrictions on the popular music I could imbibe and I binged for years and would bongo away at any woody surface until my fingers were purple or some one, any one, even our maid Dora, cried: "Stop! Please! Stop!", when I would naturally tap again with renewed vigour (the coda) and give my hands a chance to recuperate.

      I heard so much of that stuff that when in the fullness of time I read somewhere that salsa had been an invention of some half-literate Spanglish-speaking Portorican or Dominican I could tick off a list of exotic names (rumba, conga, merengue, son, sucusucu, mambo, batuque, guarare, guaracha, and so on) that proved irrefutably that the writer didn't know what he was talking about. It is my experience that American or British specialists on Latin America are, as a rule (not unbreakable by any means), on a par with the astronomer who theorized the moon is made of cheese or the one who first recognized canals in Mars (though in justice the latter was an Italian who said "canalli", which could mean just lines, and it was the translator who got the wrong idea, which just goes to show how much he knew about Italian).

      In connection with The Republic, after the oil-soaked edifice the Politicians and bureaucrats had built came tumbling down, a British "expert" said he and his colleagues had underestimated how dependent the country was on oil, and he wasn't saying this in private but in the salmon pages of the "Financial Times", which did nothing to recommend the reliability of future expositions on the subject in that newspaper. I must add that these "experts" existed only because my former countrymen did not have anything like an accurate concept of history, much less that of objectivity--although this could be asking too much of any people--and when they set pen to paper the first and only notion that came to their minds, either for or against, was Marxism over and over and over and the baggage that came with it, such as mode of production (which no one really understood), feudalism (which suggested some one like my grandfather the impoverished Protoespatharius), and historical materialism (easy enough as long as it didn't lead to dialectics, for this stumped all but those who believed they possessed alchemy's secrets if they had heard of Kojève).

      Like the Anglo-American Latin America specialists, The Republic's Marxists just went on and on like the pink toy bunny that at one time became one of America's most celebrated public figures. I have only known of a group of historical theorists who actually hunkered after it was seen that they were really fiction-writers--some quite as clever as the best of novelists--and those were Marxist dependency writers such as Wallerstein and A.G.Frank, but then who knows if they have honestly thrown in the towel or are just lying low and waiting for the Dow Jones to really really dip.

Even those who hate the shrieking of bagpipes will have to admit it does not suggest a Scotsman farting

Going back to my more mundane distractions, I suspect that Latin rhythms must have had for me the same primitive appeal of images moving on screens--this revelation, I must say, did not come to me in a moviehouse but watching Howdy-Doody in the early years of television--but unlike films, whose entertainment value for me has only fluctuated, my delight in bongo drums and knocking sticks and other more sophisticated African instruments--most impressively, one they call furro or furruco in my former country--fell by the wayside gradually after I left my Miami "home" and did not have access to my trove of 78-rpms.

      The furro incidentally consists of a stick attached to a drum surface and when rubbed makes a sound like continuous farting, with some modulation. I read somewhere--probably the Guinness Book of Records--that a Frenchman could do this with his ass and gave up his act, which became popular in some Montmartre dives, only after the start of the Great War. The furro is used in an ensemble of instruments called a gaita--meaning bagpipes, which is about the most aberrant etymology I've heard of, although maybe not--played by drooling idiots who accompany chorus lines of nattily dressed fat men singing jingles about mutilated goats and legendary (usually noisy) drunkards.

      Another pleasingly low-brow evasion was my comic-book collection. The word "book" in this context represents another gross catachresis--not quite as outrageous as the association of furro and bagpipes, for even those who hate the shrieking of bagpipes will admit it does not suggest a Scotsman farting--for those were not books in any reasonable sense of the term but more like pamphlets or at most booklets, but from my highly prejudiced point of view, "pamphlets" was one of those high-falutin' words Americans didn't feel comfortable with and "booklet" was probably what a bookie did. My collection of "comic-books" was extensive and it was kept in scrupulous order according to publishers.

      I never read any one of them more than once--my cretin credentials are not unblemished--and I might have enjoyed more collecting than reading the stuff inside them, which I knew was nonsense and a shameful comedown from the books I read back in the Kingdom about such subjects as Cortez burning his ships and the story of Prince Crow, the latter the acme of romance and ingenuity as far as I was concerned. It was about a flighty, spoiled princess who rejected all her suitors--a true feminist caricatured by an obviously macho re-writer, for the original of the version I read was in Straparola--and in particular a Prince who truly loved her and whom she ridiculed for his hooked but noble profile. In exasperation the father swore he would give her away to the first person who knocked on the palace door, which the prince (a true Machiavellian) found out from his spies and rushed to be that person disguised as a combination of corsair and ragman. He accepted her with carefully concealed joy, took her to a hovel (not obviously his palace), and made her work her elbows off. By now any one who doesn't recognize the basic plot of the Taming of the Shrew hasn't had the guts to digest these confessions, so I will not continue, and the only reason I have lingered over this fairy tale is because, insignificant as it seems, it influenced my notion of love, which Carmen hadn't quite fully shaped.

      The stack of my entire comic-"book" collection was at least, I kid you not, six-feet high, and if it hadn't been for our inveterate instability as a family, and my mother's total indifference to possessions--and who could blame her when she had been conditioned by the Antihypatus-Lawyer to be ready at any time to raise camp and move on, which she compensated by conditioning me about hotels?--that collection, which was lost during one hasty removal or other, together with other belongings, such as my precious Lionel locomotive, today would fetch a small fortune at an auction. That's life for you. Love the Bewitcher said it all in the gitano-style lyrics (applicable to anything of value, especially life itself): "Flee, and it will pursue you; chase it, and it will flee".

My seduction by the Taxiarch's maid to the strains of "Hark the Angels Singing"

And speaking of love, culture clash had to have its impact, particularly as it struck in my pre-pubescence. I imagine that if I had stayed in The Republic I would have made my Carmen-dreams come "true" with some one like her, but in America my chances for that realization were next to nil apart from other artificial handicaps which made me seem gauche and reinforced my tendency to shyness. Part of the attraction of films was that love involved a simple formula which you knew would always work, if only by recognizing who played the leading roles in any specific movie. There was occasionally room for some slight ambiguity but like Malvolio all great film heroes had love thrust upon them, and so I expected would happen to me, but it only happened once with a red-headed, snub-nosed girl named Maureen with whom I had an incipient parody of a courtship. When I invited her to a movie (where else?) and she accepted, I dreamt all night of groping her and was sorely disappointed when she dressed in tight pants zippered in the back and all I could do was fondle and massage her bulk to little effect. She must have found me odd and as I was not really attracted to her we parted as strangers after the show.

      Alternatively, and this was my real desire, I imagined myself alone with a girl--preferably Heddy Lamarr on a deserted island--whom I could seduce at my ease by various enjoyable and prolonged means. But the likelihood of this situation coming about was about on a par with my becoming the Aga Khan and marrying Rita Hayworth, so I had to settle for romantic fantasies which at least were inhabited by lovelies I knew, such as Solange, a popular bobby-socker with flowing hair and a sweet smile (much older than me) whom I stalked from a cautious distance around the school.

      The opportunity for some real necking finally presented itself in the person of Chelita, a good-looking, somewhat pimply girl, who was marginally more knowledgeable about sex than I was and taught me to French kiss, a technique I had not discovered in my Carmen-vagina dreams. It was a real revelation for me, enough for my first ejaculatio praecox but not much more, because her parents kept her on a short lead and I lost interest in her when Ada entered my life. Ironically, Chelita later became an actress and even had a brief starting role in a soaper, which prompted me to show her a play I had written. She was so chuffed with her success that she told me it stank. She died quite young and I didn't shed a tear, which gave me an insight into the Jew of Malta's offhand confession that he had only committed fornication once and "besides the wench is dead".

      Ada I fell for head over heels but she didn't even unbend. I wrote passionate letters to her--the first floruit of my literary vocation--in which I used original, ordinary-life metaphors, such as the coupling of wagons, inspired by my knowledge of miniature electric trains, but they didn't cut any ice either.

      The consummation of my pent-up desire occurred in a most unexpected way. The Taxiarch and his wife had also moved to Miami, but this time our family was not so destitute and I was allowed into his house, which gave me the opportunity one day of tormenting him by playing in his gramophone a recording of a pseudo-folk song from our country--it's called "The Plainsman's Soul" and is still being used when hosts want to indicate a party is over--so many times in a row that he, who was a patient man, finally roared: "Can't somebody, anybody, get that boy to stop!" Carmen Alicia, their servant, a large woman with firm flesh in all the right places, took notice, as she had been noticing me, and one night her bosses were out, she invited me over to hear "The Plainsman's Soul".

      After the first hearing I realized she wasn't thinking of spiritual matters at all, assuming I was a budding Plainsman myself, and when she lay on the floor and hitched her flimsy skirt to, I'd say, if memory serves me right, about a few inches below where the thigs meet I knew the jig was up for my virginity, physically speaking naturally. Details I think would be vulgar, but suffice it to say that Carmen Alicia had been going through a long dry spell and when I first came, which didn't take too long, she simply would not let go until my easily rechargeable batteries, or more accurately, battery, began to function once more, and all the time "The Plainsman's Soul" galloping away at full blast. Wisely, we lowered the volume at the appropriate intervals, so that we heard the Taxiarch arrive to find me sitting demurely listening to "Hark the Angels Singing".

      After that I was careful not to try his patience for I did not want to risk the possibility of being banished from his house, in case, for instance, the Lawyer-Journalist's success turned out to be short-lived. It didn't. But that's not the point now. The Taxiarch moved not much afterwards--he too was the restless sort, which has often made me wonder if their real ancestors might not have been Picts, of whom the name is all that remains--and Carmen Alicia with them and I was left with these troublesome boners and nobody to thrust them at.

Joseph McCarthy was contributing enthusiastically to the confusion when he was not too drunk to know the difference between a communist and a bottle of Johnny Walker red

Events in our The Republic had been moving at a fast pace, not unlike a small-scale replay of what was going on in the rest of the world. The Young Military who had recruited the Politicians to kick out fat Dynast Meca, played the democrats and bided their time while their allies made a hash of things--it became worse and worse the more the oil money flowed in--until they calculated, so accurately they might have had some prompting, they could proceed with impunity.

      The Cold War was starting. Stalin had briefly humoured the democracies but that was time enough to provide grounds for ambiguities about his intentions, although given his thuggish nature it's hard to believe he gave a damn for what people like Sartre or the Dean of Canterbury thought about him and his regime. When he had Berlin blockaded many thought that Germans were only getting what they deserved, which was true enough if it wasn't for the fact that Stalin was the one giving it to them and history also had accounts to settle with him.

      When he autorized and supported the invasion of South Korea, there were some who ransacked The New York Times for items which "proved" that, one, the Americans had provoked the invasion, or, two, they knew it was coming. Times could be confusing--neurotic is the word, but I did not yet have it in my vocabulary--except for people like Joseph McCarthy, and he was contributing enthusiastically to the confusion when he was not too drunk to know the difference between a communist and a bottle of Johnny Walker red.

      Telescoping and compressing on a personal level, I was inclined to accept that a lot of what was said about communism had to be propaganda, but when the Soviets invaded Hungary I was prepared to volunteer as a freedom fighter even though I wasn't sure whether Magyar was a language or a special recipe for goulash, and I wasn't too sure about goulash either. Incidentally, these minor historical lapses have been corrected over the years.

      On another front, the West wasn't too happy about having so many backward countries either on its side or posturing as neutrals, and this is where the concept of underdevelopment and development economics had their field day. As a rule of thumb, economists are bogus. At best, like Adam Smith, they mirror accurately what societies come by on their own, and at worst they invent useless formulas which makes them feel like astrophysicists, which can be dangerous for others, as was the case of the economist who devised some mathematical approach to hedging risks for which he got the Nobel Prize and then went and busted a giant fund he himself had founded.

"Normal" economists scoffed at development economics. Keynes expressed their views succintly when he dismissed Cubans, who were being advised by development economists, as "monkeys". Development economists were every bit as good at obfuscating as "normal" economists and since they were claiming that they could turn backward economies into whirring dynamos they began to get the bigwigs' ears. They were not finicky about politics and that's the kind of attitude Washington needed. It was agreed the important thing was to get developing economies to be productive--more zest, less siesta, was the motto--and eventually democracy would take care of itself.

On the whole, the political patrons of developmentalism felt more comfortable, especially in Latin America, with strong, stable, no-nonsense governments, and the Politicians in The Republic were bullshiters non-pareil. What they had in their hands was a country so truly retarded it clamoured for discipline, education, and roads, and what they mainly were providing were public-sector jobs and talk about democracy and economic progress. The jobs were allocated among the party faithful, which made many people unhappy, and this, combined with the democratic rhetoric, made for instability.

      The United States had nothing to fear from the Politicians, but it probably preferred that the Young Military took over--Guatemala, practically a next-door neighbour, was ablaze with people making such subversive demands as food and the abolition of public floggings--and no eyelashes batted in Washington when the Politicians were evicted. The Lawyer had neither resentment nor love for the Politicians. He was just doing his job and doing it well. He had no connections with the Military and so it was with a clean conscience that he bought with good money (albeit at a cut-rate) a daily that had belonged to the Politicians and the Military were sitting on.

How my degenerate Saint Bernard got the Ellis Island treatment and Seppy had cause to regret his freedom

To me, quite frankly, these things could be happening in Mars for all I knew or cared, although I was still pining for personal stability of whatever sort. I did not know it at the time, but I was well beyond the possibility of belonging anywhere. I was in anomie long before I realized it, so I appreciated tokens of belongingness, which was what I got with a back-home dog with the curious name of Duck the Lawyer-Journalist managed to get through customs. Duck was a degenerate St Bernard and his real name was Duke but he got the Ellis Island treatment and came through as Duck, which seemed OK to me.

      With Duck begins the history of my friendlier relations with canines, from which, I must anticipate, the other parties did not benefit. Duck was my constant companion when I wasn't in school. When photos were to be taken he had pride of place in the usual tongue-hanging-out dog pose, although I never went to the extremes of a couple I once met--an ex-nun who had divorced Christ to marry some one who can only be compared to a bored kibitzer at Golgotha--who kept four albums full of prints of a dumb-looking mutt no bigger than a Pomeranian. Lucky Jim, the mutt's name, had passed away and these people showed their collection of photos with a creepy mixture of sorrow and defiance. I told them Lucky Jim was very nice. I never asked how he died for fear of a long story, which surely could not have been as heart-rending as that of old Seppy, a wirehaired Daschhund whom a friend of mine in Nettown doted on. His mistress lived in mortal fear for Seppy's life which mostly was spent in a lovely backyard running and barking at the planes from Heathrow. The only time he was ever even close to a street Seppy ran like the Dickens and was promptly run over by a car.

      Getting back to Duck, he made the mistake--but who could in all honesty blame him when he literally shared my bed?--of chewing to tatters the lapel of an elegant, grey-green suit I was going to wear the next day to impress Chelita. Or maybe Ada. I know it wasn't Maureen, and Carmen Alicia was not impressed by anything not made of flesh. Be that as it may, I banged Duck up pretty hard and the poor mongrel was so astonished he just went to a corner in my room and lay there until he died.

      Don't let the mongrel part throw you though because anybody saying animals are not intelligent has a quarrel picked with me and that brings up that I have to hand it to the Lawyer-Journalist, who once told me that dogs were better than people. That at first shocked me for two related reasons: it was at odd with his vaunted socialism and it did not fit into my own budding system of political beliefs. Before I could agree with him, I had to go through a long and convoluted philosophical process this is not the place to start on.

      The next dog I had was a one-balled, mean-as-hell, and tough-as-nails Doberman Pinscher. I have never been fat myself, but Pushkin was definitely overweight for a Doberman. Now, Pushkin was my slave except in the matter of obedience, in which he was as ornery as they come, and after I spent one entire afternoon trying to teach him not to jump fences and to stay put in our more than ample yard, and what I got was remorse for mistreating him, I gave it up. We tried raising the block fence until it was double its original height but, even though Pushkin never lost weight, he kept climbing over all obstacles.

      I often saw how he did it. He would take impulse at a run, jump like a bat out of hell, grab the edge of the fence with his front paws, and then he would leave his back carriage scrape away for all it was worth until he was on top and in an instant bounded down and away. We also tried barbed wire and he managed to get even through that, upon which, since our place was starting to look like a concentration camp which could not contain its only inmate, we had it removed. I guess he was a vocational street dog, although he knew enough to be home for meals and nobody could accuse him of being a mere stray.

      Food was another area in which Pushkin did exactly as he wanted. I tried to feed him dry dog chow and he refused. I would baste it in stock and he wouldn't touch it. I would put meat under a batch of the dusty pellets and he would knock over the can and pick out the meat which he would carefully lick clean of the other stuff. This was amazing to me because I had seen hungry dogs eating shit and Pushkin wouldn't touch the dog food even when I cut down on his rations or did not serve him for a day or two the boiled offal he relished.

      I definitely understood that Pushkin had unmistakable human characteristics when I brought my first wife home after he and I had been separated for a number of years. He was still my dog, as happy to see me as ever, but every time she approached him he would growl. He was aware of how things now stood between us and, as he hand't given up his street-prowling habits, one day he returned home his tongue badly cut and bleeding, he gazed at me panting for a while but without a whimper, and then he left again and disappeared. I swore I would never have another dog again, and so it was.

      Many years later, when I was starting my philosophical studies, I came across an argument in Fodor about mental language and it became clear to me that if Pushkin and Duck were not capable of human-like feelings and of logic--for how else could they even have recognized me or any one at all?--then there were no such things. This does not mean that I am an unconditional dog-lover. Cats, who by contrast make dogs seem like despicable slobs, are what I would keep now if I had to choose a pet, and I know of dogs I would have put down if given half a chance.

      There was a Rottweiler in particular whose guts I hated so much I imagined batting his head off. He belonged to Freddy and he was trained to bite for the heck of it. Freddy himself was a queer bird. He had a faithful old Dalmatian whose teeth had fallen out and Freddy was openly impatient about the dog's refusal to pass away. He pined for a ferocious young dog which is why he got the Rottweiler, whose exploits, like biting a saucy worker in the ass, he narrated with glee. I used to go to his house, mostly because he was an old friend of a woman I was going out with then, until I finally said to myself the hell with Freddy and his stupid Rottweiler and that was the end of that. My friend did not object because she had been the victim of a gratuious aggression by one of Freddy's dogs--he had two Rottweilers but I singled one out for my particular dislike--which left her in a state of shock for days. The break with Freddy left few memories, certainly less affecting than those I have of cryptorchidic old Pushkin.

The libelous accusation that I was a jerk off makes headlines stirring in me thoughts of revenge

Freddy was also gay--although this has nothing to do with his sadistic delectation in spiteful Rottweilers--and this brings to mind my encounters with gays during my youth. The Antihypatus had two fundamental preoccupations about me: one, which I already mentioned, concerned my libido, and the other was the fear that I could be gay. He never was explicit about either or maybe I just don't remember but the concern was unmistakable. I suspect that his fear was for how my sexual conduct would reflect on him.

      This proprietary attitude could also be observed in the Taxiarch. He and his wife adopted a boy late in their childless marriage. I suppose they expected an heir for his millions and that he would marry and give them grandchildren. They were excellent parents, but through one of those quirks that life has, their son Angelico possessed--in his genes I would say--what I never did and that was an unobtrusive but genuine and pertinacious religious vocation. In sum, he wanted to be a monk.

      His father was understandably disappointed, but he was also a practicing Catholic and there was no way that in good conscience he could oppose his son's intentions, so finally he had to give in, or seemed to, because, like the Antihypatus but by other means, he had to have his way. He had a son and he wanted him to be his son and he could not stand that his son should place his devotion elsewhere than in himself, even if elsewhere was God. So the Taxiarch did a transparent suicide-simulation--it was a classic use of the plastic-bag-over-the-head--and he finally got at least half of what he wanted: Angelico would be in his order but he would spend half his time with his parents, which meant he could not take vows requiring a total renunciation of the world.

      On his half-year stints with his parents, Angelico and I would occasionally get together and drink ourselves blind and I figured that when the time came when he could fully join the order he would hang up his robes and go back to New York where he had been raised. I could not have been more wrong. The Taxiarch died and Angelico stuck by his mother even when she grew more and more senile and when she too died he gave away or sold all his belongings and went back to his monastery.

      The Taxiarch's money, which Angelico also administered, wisely as far as I could tell, he must have donated to his order and was probably used to acquire the monastery where he lives high on an Andean mountainside with a delightful climate and awesome views. I have been tempted to join him there but this is because I sometimes imagine that it would be like living in the Academy or the Lyceum and I know that in reality it is mostly about milking cows and making cheese with respites for praising God and composing conventionally monkish homilies. Besides, what I am now is a sort of reformed agnostic and I am still as far as I ever was from having truly religious feelings.

      They were two of a kind, the Taxiarch and the Antihypatus! My father didn't have to worry about my joining the priesthood, but he would have been floored if I had told him I was homosexual. His fear was so great I myself sometimes wondered--at the slightest sentiment which might have revealed even a trace of homophilia--whether I was not a repressed homosexual. This may explain my fear of intimacy and an indifference to friendship so pronounced the concept is virtually meaningless to me. It also explains why, even though I knew what was coming every time, I allowed gays to approach me but never put out. I might have been testing myself but if so they were useless exercises because even after I knew I had experienced no attraction whatever for the other man it only took a short while before I started worrying again over whether my lack of homosexual arousal was not an attitude proportionate to the strength of my father's palpable horror of homosexuality.

      There was this time in Hellhole High when I was told that a fat, rosy-cheeked boy liked to masturbate his friends. He wasn't my friend but we had talked on friendly terms and he seemed like a gentle, pleasant kind of person, so one day when I saw him enter my room very softly and I had only a towel over my privates I thought: "Here it goes". He sat next to my bed without a word and I began having an erection that was too obvious, so I uncovered myself thinking: "Well, this is it", and this big, friendly guy stared at my erect, friendly penis, who was practically saying: "Hello, anybody there?", and he just looked at it for a while and got up and left. I had no idea what had happened, but I did feel relieved. I mean, I had been willing to have this guy jerk me off, but I also felt pity for him as well as that this was not a satisfactory situation any way you grabbed it and that is possibly what he might have read in my eyes.

      Certainly I never had the expression of utter indecency that Cappy, one of my two room-mates, showed when our other room-mate, an older cousin or uncle or something of his, egged him on to masturbate in front of us and Cappy was only too happy to oblige. Those two were a very instructional pair. Cappy in particular was a fledgling showman, as his shameless exhibitionism eloquently demonstrated. He eventually became a well known television presenter (he kept his more scandalous displays under wrap), edgy as hell when he visited my office at the height of his fame. He later died of a drug overdose. His uncle or whatever I never heard from again.      

      Another way in which the Antihypatus strictures had a boomerang effect had to do with masturbation itself. He was even less enlightened than Spanish psychiatrists and actually believed that masturbation made people become insane or stupid. For whatever reason, perhaps I had scruples or I thought masturbating was messy--all that soapy, spittle-like liquid sticking to your hands and dripping on your body and the bedsheets!--but I was not an inveterate masturbator. Yet the Managing Editor insisted I was and one day he called me a "jerkoff" in front of everybody in the newspaper so loudly I wondered if he wasn't intending to publish it in the following day's edition. That was definitely inconsiderate and especially it was not true.

      Now, my torture-the-torturers idealism included a tendency to get huffy over calumnies and lies and I knew there was no way I could make the Managing Editor, which was what the Lawyer had definitely become, eat his words, so opting for the only means that would make the libel less injurious I decided I would become a masturbator. I did not for one moment believe that jerking off did anything to your brain, or that it would make my right palm grow hairs, which anyway would have been a sensational achievement.

      The normal state of our relations was a phony war, undeclared even, in which whatever he said I did the opposite if I could get away with it. It was easy if it was something I had to do, because I could always fall back on a work-to-rules attitude: if I wasn't actively doing anything wrong, doing something right was strictly supererogatory, and the hell with it. If it was something I had to stop doing, like not scratching my ass in public, it was also easy but I would have to do it on the sly.

      At some time in our years in Miami a group of families from The Republic followed our lead and bought or rented houses in the same neighborhood we lived in. An old friend of our family, a pioneer photographer back in our country--which means he was taking photographs around 1925--gave me an 8mm camera I honestly did not know what to do with. I was in love with the large screen and that was my standard. So what could I do with a small camera apart from filming old Duck romping about our front yard? The people around me weren't exactly movie stars and the plots I could think of were for the likes of Gary Cooper and Virginia Mayo, whose strabic looks had for me a je ne se quoi of piquancy. On a trip to Tampa with Chelita next to me I was expressly instructed to be economical with footage. I was economical alright but with images of our group. When the developed reel came back from Kodak and it was projected on a sheet before the assembled expats, it had about five minutes of Duck, half of which were a defecating scene, and five minutes of Everglades grass rushing past the window of the car.

      That put a damper on the hopes that I would soon be taking up filming as a career, although strangely enough in Hellhole a Brother, probably because I could speak English and didn't look like some one who had spent the last ten years in a jungle, handed me an old Graphic as if I had just emerged from the news room of The Daily News and named me school photographer then and there. A Graphic is easy to operate, but it does require about ten precise steps none of which can be skipped, and it is heavy. I received about ten minutes instructions on its use and I did not get much practice before I was sent to cover a football game in which the only strategy the two teams used was to push as hard as they could at each other. Naturally, in half the takes I had forgotten to remove the black plastic cover that had to be slid in front of the huge film cartridge (I never found out why) and in the best of the others the scrimmage looked vaguely like a lopsided homosexual orgy in which the participants forgot to get naked, perhaps because it was taking place in the open air.

      These shortcomings were probably why in my years as journalist I took a special interest in photography--by then the Graphic had been made obsolete by 35mm cameras--and why I am a composition freak and most of the photographs I take are meaningless to every one but me, who consider them works of genius. But the fact remains that photography, much as I have come to appreciate it, even to theorizing at length about it, has never been the medium I wanted to be immortalized by.

      During the Miami years, I was mostly working hard at survival and the best strategy I knew was to lay low. It was obvious I was staring directly at neurosis but I did not even know the word. When I finally caught up with it, or it caught up with me, I had so much documentation it was as if I had written an entire novel before I had a title for it. Whatever it was that was ailing me was not improved by the Managing Editor's as usual arbitrary decision to send me to the place I have been calling Hellhole High.

As punishment for my audacity in comparing myself to Eisenhower (favourably), I get sent to Hell Hole High Boarding School

I sensed something was not right in the script I had been handed in life, but this became a horrifying discovery during the following episode in my young life. I do not know exactly when or why the Managing Editor decided to send me to Hellhole High Boarding School. I know I had disregarded his advice on camarography and I had let fly the golf iron and I had thrown away the golden ring, I know in sum I was something of a problem, but even so there was no call for his sending me to that place, where revenge was exacted in utter disproportion to my ultimately minor errancies.

      It was possible somebody back in The Republic had recommended the place. As I said, illiteracy was rampant and if you knew how to read and write you were candidate for higher office. Hellhole High Boarding School was not really called that. It was the St Jude Preparatory School (Prep for short) and it occupied a wondrously forested hilltop near a one-street village with the fairy tale name of Spring Valley. It was Pennsylvania Dutch country--Lancaster was a bare ten miles away--and the land all around looked as if it had been tended for a painting by Brueghel.

      Conceivably, he might have wanted me to be in touch with my countrymen. This would be consistent with my being in America only to learn English, which I already used with as much ease as I did my native tongue, certainly much better than President Eisenhower, whose garbled sentences--"I will say this...which is...if I had to say...what I would say...I will certainly say I would think it is better that Secretary Dulles has said it or would say it"--have been defended by historians as a genius for dissimulation, which is exactly what I thought he did about his ability to express himself. 

      In those days traffic was scarce and there were meadows and fields one could walk alone for hours. Behind one of the rows of houses and storefronts in Spring Valley there was a small paper mill, which occasionally belched a cloying smell in the borderline, to quote Jonah Webster, with miasmatic effluvia. The many streams around must have been polluted but you couldn't tell by looking at them.

      St Jude was above and beyond all that. Inside the school property you were in a quiet park with thick, lofty trees and the views from the height were immaculately and pleasantly rural. The school consisted of a large building and smaller dependencies for classrooms on the slopes towards the road. The place was run by the Augustinian order, but originally it must have belonged to a very rich family because it had a swimming pool, a bathhouse, and an abandoned tennis court, which have never been requisites for a religious community. The main building was a rambling Gothic-style mansion and it was there the inmates lived.

      To be more precise, the student body consisted of locals and boarders and the latter were those whom I call the "inmates". Of these about 90% came from The Republic and the rest, maybe 10 or 15, were dummkopfs who responded indistinctly to their names or to bozo. Their training in that sense at least was good. They had probably been on a long pilgrimage and St Jude was the school of last resort. For other reasons, I would soon join the line of pilgrims like them.

Thumbnail sketches of the inmates at Hell Hole High including me swallowing my own bile  

The high concentration of my compatriots in what to them must have been a highly exotic locale was enigmatic, but then most things that had happened to me were, in particular my cultural transplantation. I would eventually fit this into an astounding chain of causes, involving, among other things, a letter my mother placed within my reach as if by accident, but St Jude Prep will forever guard from me the secret of why it was chosen by the Lawyer for me. By whatever route the others had landed in that school, and me with them, the important thing was that there they were, over one hundred of my compatriots, and there was I, eager to bond with them and explore my social roots.

      They weren't by any means like gingerbread cut-outs but they shared certain basic traits and they could also be divided into discrete groups. Cappy and his uncle formed a duo apart, which I joined afterwards. Some were from traditional families, but the majority were of the people who had benefitted from the uprising of the Politicians and the Military against the Dynasts. That meant their parents might have had primary education, not of very good quality but better than secondary and far superior to higher studies, which were mostly followed to go up in the world. The average age for the group was high, closer to 20 than to 15 I would say--I cannot have been more than 13 or 14--and since they knew little or no English and their chances of increasing their knowledge were slim, their presence in St Jude might have had to do with the herd instict--a few were actually scions of ranchers on newly cleared forest land--and the fact that the school was not very expensive. Nevertheless, for most of them their families had to be splurging to show off, a supposition which is reinforced by their numbers and gregariousness.

      If I force myself to, which is a bit like swallowing my own bile, I can do brief pen portraits of some of my fellow inmates: there was Olivares, a runt with no neck, over twenty years old, with whom comparisons would be offensive for any individual or group; Bravo, another shorty-oldie, enjoyed pulling out a switchblade until a Costa Rican tough named Peralta went after him with a knife half the size of a machete and Bravo took refuge under a bed; Peralta himself might possibly, given the median personality profile in that place, have been more than half-insane (through his glasses, his eyes had a anxious, wild glint); fat Innard, nicknamed Bellbuoy, was a follower whenever there was some bullying to be done; the toughest of the lot, Ghio, amply deserved the Mad Bull moniker he was known by; melon-head Frantz Boodles was a busybody so tightfisted he would suck on the residues of the chocolate milk half pints he found in the canteen. But I could be belabouring the point that whatever I might have been for good or ill, I had nothing in common with not a single one of these compatriots I had expected so much from. And my situation was that after I entered St Jude there was nothing I could do to escape and I was forced to take to heart the Dantesque injunction to the damned and give up all hope.

      A few incidents will suffice to give the atmosphere of the place, which physically was like a maze of corridors with some large rooms adapted either as lounges or dormitories with two-tiered bunks. The idea of fun for many of these people was goosing each other followed by loud hardiharhars and obscene bawlings. When I first witnessed this I tried to keep out of their way, but I was too different for them not to notice me and as I did not belong to any group, which was the means most had for self-protection, Olivares began to pick on me. I went into my windmill routine which did me no good for he was an experienced boxer and before I knew it he had me pinned down on the floor with a crowd looking on and having a ball. For all I remember from that degrading experience he could have taken his prick out and stuck into my mouth. Mind, I am not saying that he did but that I could do nothing about it had he wanted to.

      After that untoward event, I did some calculating and concluded I had to shed some dignity for the sake of survival. There was no point in fighting--Bellbuoy, Olivares' crony, would have crushed me if he had sat on me--so the best alternative was to move as far as possible from those savages, which is where Cappy and his uncle, who were more or less level-headed degenerates, came in as room-mates and tacit allies even if for this strategy I had to pay the price of witnessing Cappy's disgusting masturbatory prowesses, which, I did not mention before, included ejaculating through deep meditation. When in the course of time I became interested in Tantrism, this experiences inured me against being impressed by the orgiastic rituals of its practictioners, and, I would say further, against any special claims about the powers of meditation itself. If nothing else, Cappy was definitive proof that sex is mostly in the mind, as could be Ingres' crowded painting of chubby Harem maids--so naked and a-jumble you wish you could jump right in--which was composed when the painter was 82 years old and either a freak of nature or a filthy-minded old man.

      On the whole, my strategy to ward off my fellow inmates was successful, but St Jude was not, as school buildings went, a large place, and it was impossible to avoid at some time or another the antics of my fellow students. There was an incident in particular which squeezed out of me whatever measure of respect or affinity for them I might have still retained, and that was the night a group of them discovered a skunk in the school courtyard and promptly opened a sack of potatos that was lying there for the next day's meals and pelted the poor creature to death. I watched and said nothing. There would have been no point since one of the executioners of the luckless skunk had acquired some notoriety back home as the killer of a penguin that had escaped from some merchantman in the harbour and had been so unfortunate as to be placed in the local lampoon of a zoo. He had done it with a well-aimed stone and he had no cause to do it except maybe to hone his mango-downing skills.

And where were, you might well ask, the Augustinians while these things were going on? For all the discipline they had applied in that place they might as well have been living in Hippo after the Vandals took over. They were permissive to a fault and not only allowed smoking all over the place but even licensed the sale of cigarettes in the canteen. My addiction to nicotine began with the carton of Lucky Strikes I pilfered leading to my disillusionment with the regenerative virtue of the confessional.

The confessor in whom I confided had his own luxury car, in which he came and went. As far as I can recall, the only priest in the dorms was a dypsomaniac who kept a bottle of Four Roses in his locker, from which we occasionally took swigs until we were caught and given strappings by the headmaster, Father Mandelstan, a tall, florid man who, in my opinion, hadn't the foggiest idea how to run any school, much less one in which half the student body spoke a language he couldn't understand. The other cleric who was ever around was the brother who made me school photographer, which is either saying something good about me or something terrible about his pedagogical skills.

      As my main lookout in that place was to keep out of harm's way I had no incentive to study or even read--apart from the noticeable absence of a library--and my education suffered a momentary but significant setback. What I did learn in Hellhole High from the shock of the introduction to my countrymen was that I had lost a homeland without having a substitute for it. It was much worse than that because what I had lost was an entire cultural identity and I knew it without being aware of it. These sybilline comments will be cleared up in due time. Suffice it to say that it would be two more years before the consequences of these events came to a violent, nearly fatal climax, involving minor derelictions that were blown out of all proportions by a sanctimonious headmaster and by an off-duty cop who couldn't shoot straight.

      Of the rogues' gallery I presented before, I can say that Olivares and Bravo went on to become furro-players and minor bureaucrats. Peralta hanged himself in a mens room. Mad Bull had an unsuccessful career as an insurance salesman. Bellbuoy did achieve some notice as a minor oil company executive, mostly because he hogged a lot of space in group photographs. Boodles for all I know was swallowed by the earth. While living in New York a few years back, I returned to Spring Valley and found that the paper mill had sprawled over so much countryside it surrounded the St Jude Prep grounds and the school had closed. Father Mandelstan had died the year before.

My meeting with the Elephant Man at The Mount and its regrettable consequences for my understanding of "The Waste Land"

I had fully believed I would be going back to St Jude after that first hideous year and surprisingly I mildly protested when I was ordered to report to The Mount. Why I protested might seem irrational but it has a simple explanation which is that I was not really protesting not returning to Hellhole High but registering my general dissatisfaction with the way my life was being run. It was in sum a gesture, futile as usual. Like Hamlet and his hated stepfather, I knew exactly how the Managing Editor's ledger stood with me. 

      The Mount was a properly run, large, and prestigious prep school. Although it had been founded in a place with the pejorative-sounding name of Pottyville--to add insult to injury, it was the very working-class and smoggy site of a Jericho Steel plant--it was ranked among the exclusive "Eastern Seven" which also included Exeter and Phillips. The Mount's credentials were in part sustained by its traditional rivalry in soccer with Harryville, a school which had the privilege of being located near Princeton, whereas the closest The Mount was geographically to higher education was a junior college in Reading. The Mount, as I remember, had an average of about one win in five.

      In point of natural ambiance, then, Hellhole had The Mount beat by a country mile, but that was about it. The Mount, whatever its defects, was a good school and especially it excelled academically. It was there I recouped some of my mathematical losses. There were other personal educational highlights. It gave me my rudiments of French, which later left my French interlocutors agape (although by then I knew enough to know it wasn't because of my mastery of the language). My passion for history, which could be traced to my incunabular readings, was reinforced by a fellow named Twister, who lost no love on me but always had to give me the highest grades in the class. I particularly remember Quasimodo, a literature teacher (not a personal favorite either) who taught me at least two things that rank in importance with Auerbach's interpretation of Don Quijote: one was that the physical representation of the metaphors in Joyce Kilmer's sebaceous poem "Tree" made him (our teacher) assume a pose reminiscent of the Elephant Man; and the other, that the stage directions in the original quarto edition of Hamlet were not necessarily infallible.

      The Hamlet lesson was more fodder for the inconoclastic demon inside me. And Kilmer was so discredited in my eyes that I did a double-take decades later when I saw that an interchange on the New Jersey Turnpike was named after him. I thought back on Quasimodo and realized that the purpose of his tirade against Kilmer had been to teach us to distinguish between good and bad poetry and that if he was the possessor of such a touchstone he wouldn't have been the obscure employee of a glorified high school, which was about the size of it, not that this made any difference to the essential worthlessness of the specific poem in question. Acting in unison, such intellectual, idol-bashing tendencies were what later prompted a satirical essay on priggish Eliot which was my answer to Threepea, a professor at King's, and his cloying paeans to "The Waste Land", invariably followed by patronizing banter with the students, all this about a poem which was supposedly the epitome of despair, in itself a farfetched pose for a successful careerist who dressed and looked like the understanding family undertaker. I got a C+, but the + is what counts.

Having been taunted with being a spaghetti-lover, I am not troubled at calling my best friend an onion-eating Jew

Those literary lessons were still to be assimilated when I first arrived at The Mount and what I had then was a feeling of relief, even contained joy, at having escaped miasmatic Hellhole. Unbelievable though it may seem after all I have said about my cultural alienation, I felt as if I was back in civilization in this school, where my countrymen, thankfully, were only five, of whom three, as I later found out, were Jewish. It could be said that the process I was experiencing consisted--here also I have to make a strong muscular exertion about the throat--in the Americanization of me. I would soon be sorely disappointed.

      I was assigned to a room in one of the large dorm buildings. The Mount was so huge it had two of those, which included classrooms at ground and basement levels, on two sides of a quadrangle, the other sides being occupied by a huge auditorium and a non-denominational chapel. Apparently the room was in a section for "newies" because as I remember a group of about six or seven of us gathered as total strangers to exchange personal information.

      When my turn came or when I barged in, I am not sure which, I had to make a decision on what would be more impressive about my progenitor, who by then, besides Managing Editor, had many other irons in the fire, and thinking that journalism in Spanish was an ill-fit to my new role as eager-beaver, I plumped for Owner of Brewery--an outright lie for he had only been the Lawyer for one in a merger some years before--with the bad luck that among the newies was Kringle, scion of a family that owned a well known local brew of that name, so they openly humbugged my interjection and even turned slavering to fawn on Kringle and on another fellow whose father led a contemptibly lowbrow musical ensemble known as The Transylvanians, now, with Kringle Beer, mercifully in the realm of the ephemera of American cultural history if in any way part of collective memory. I was in high dudgeon though not necessarily totally disappointed--it was early times for that--and after requesting a change of quarters, perhaps harking back to the successful strategy in Hellhole, I was sent to one of two large houses on the entry driveway to The Mount that functioned as residences each for one teacher and his family and a complement of students.

      I must assume that it was by chance that in my two years at The Mount I lived in those two houses. The first year in the first house from the entrance, headed by a Swiss Calvinist with the curiously Slavic name of Yussof, a sanctimonious entrapment-artist, and the second year in the second house, a larger affair which was presided over by a reactionary Frenchman named Thibault, who was always talking about his military career and his admiration for Eisenhower.

      The switch was at first welcome. Yussof lived downstairs. We were only about five or six students in the floor above. My room-mate was Henry Oldman. There was also a tall, flabby guy named Miller, who probably turned out to be a hail-fellow-well-met-type in further life, and a drawling Texan amazingly named or nicknamed Tex.

      Oldman loved musical comedies, which he played day in and day out, and did so with a possessive, touchy attitude, although his taste was quite pedestrian running to basically An American in Paris, South Pacific, and The King and I. He also had a passion for a single piece of classical music, Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole, a recording of which he played as a kind of intermission between musical comedies. One day Lalo's work was subjected to a knife-treatment that made it unplayable and Oldman looked at me. The others did too. It seemed to be in the nature of a Kangaroo court and for me there was no appealing to Yussof, who had already betrayed me once, as I will shortly explain.

      I had nothing to do with the deed and I had no lawyer but my own reason. To be quite honest, I felt a sense of guilt not because I was guilty but because I hated Oldman, an ugly dumb pennypincher who bragged of being a Christian Scientist and never taking aspirins--with his pinhead he probably didn't need them!--and as this sham trial gave me the opportunity of breaking with him once and for all, I told him: "Although I did not do it, just to be rid of you, keep these five bucks and stick them up your carport", and I moved into another room in the same house. Another application for change of residence would surely not have been granted and the way things were shaping up I was certain I would be having the same incompatibility problems over and over.

      In thinking back on this incident, what still intrigues me is who actually cut Oldman's record, and though it could have been any one of the others, for their musical tastes, if they had any, must have been execrable, I am inclined to believe it was either Tex, the champion vulgarian of the lot, or Oldman himself! As he probably hated me as much as I did him, this means he had the last laugh, but who's to say without more information than I have now at my command?

      My cultural adaptation program, which was in part a rebound from Hellhole High, was definitely not working out as I expected. Tex was another I was bound to collide with but when it happened I wasn't really meaning to fight and while I aimed at his body he suckered me with a blow to my unprotected jaw that put me out of combat. He later was with me in The Mount's summer camp, near Franconia, where he became the card for a time when he peroxyded his hair green and kept grinning and going: "Shucks", like a proto-type of Alfred E. Newman.

      These experiences resulted in my becoming paranoically wary of my classmates with a few exceptions such as the Facchinos. Jaimie was one of my Jewish compatriots. His brother Isaac, short, hyperactive, and ingratiating, was the star of the soccer team. In later life, Isaac and I would become friends, but I only remember Jaimie one night he entered a restaurant, tall, portly, imperious, a far cry from the short, fat, and timid freshman who had told me he was Jewish and I, who as far as I knew hadn't met a Jew in my life, told him: "Go on, don't tell me you're an onion-eating Jew!" Jaimie look abashed and I realized I had put my foot in my mouth but I only slightly regretted what I said because I remembered that back in the Dynasts' times I had been called "spaghetti-lover" by other students in one of the many schools I attended, which, for some cause ignored by me to this day, had some connection in their minds with the place I was born in and as far as I was concerned there was no greater shame involved in liking onions than in eating pasta. 

      Another two countrymen were sons of one of the Managing Editor's business partner and they were quite well-adapted at The Mount. Ramon had a reputation as a fighter. His brother Ludvig's fame rested on his impromptu back-of-chairs bongo concerts of the sort I had given up years before, but which might have reminded his listeners of Desi Arnaz, a rising husband-straightman to the comedienne Lucille Ball. Ludvig married a dime-and-ten chain heiress, who pioneered gay feminism leading to his premature death. Ramon is immensely wealthy and I am told he is the champion domino player in his yacht club.

My fidgety fellow air passenger and his trite insistence that "shit happens"

At first, surely due to some initial disorientation, my grades at The Mount were poor, but I soon got into stride and regularly made the list of ten best students (in a total enrolment of more than 500). It didn't make me any more popular than I was at the beginning nor did it lead to any efforts on my part to revive my initial social and cultural integration program. I think what definitely did this in was the smoking incident and Yussof's betrayal. 

      I still had the vice I acquired in Hellhole because of the Augustines' permissiveness--although in honesty its true origins might well be traced to the Redskins I smoked as a child--and I had joined the smokers' den in The Mount for which the only requisite was getting broomed three times in the ass. The den was open on certain hours during which the members sat around and blew smoke. The only amenity was a record player and a recording of "Tiger Rag" which was played so often its owner one evening got up, removed it from the platter, and cracked it on his knee.

      I hardly smoke today and wouldn't be caught dead in one of those foggy, prison-like airport so-called lounges for smokers, but at The Mount I enjoyed my smokes and was not ashamed of it. I also must have suspected cigarettes were a disgusting habit, possibly harmful, even though their pathogenic properties had not been proven or were not generally acknowledged, because later at Kings I started trying to kick the habit, a struggle that has go on thorough most of my life since then. At some point, I discovered Montecristos and I became a long-life Havana fan. I would still be smoking Partagas or Los Statos if tobacco didn't build up toxins in my body causing a host of unpleasant side effects, which suggests that smoking for me is the equivalent of taking arsenic in small doses.

      All that needs to be known about the nicotine vice can be found in two works: Il Segreto di Susanna, a short comic opera by Wolf-Ferrari, and The Confessions of Zeno, by the Triestine writer Italo Svevo. In the musical work, smoking is a pleasurable dalliance and the plot ends with all the characters joyfully emitting smoke from all visible orifices. In Svevo smoking is a comic slavery because of the many useless stratagems the pathetic narrator employs to rid himself of his habit. But this is funny in the way three blind men I saw in a Bombay train were funny. They clambered into the wagon, did a beggars's skit which nobody paid attention to, and got off at the next station, whereon the lead man promptly walked into a metal pillar and fell backwards on his trusting companions. It was hilarious, but who was laughing?

      Yussof did not smoke and he could detect a cigarette the instant it was lit anywhere in the house and for at least four hours afterwards. Flattened to dish-size, replicated as many times as necessary, and installed in ceilings of rooms, he could have cut down considerably on all smoking-related fires in the world.

      One day I did the unthinkable at The Mount and lit up in my room. Yussof detected the misdeed the moment he arrived and went straight for me. I naturally said "no" and he got on my case for the better part of an hour. At the end, he finally got me with his promise that it was a first offense and nothing much would happen, but what happened was I got forty-five demerits, which, according to the system at The Mount, was only five short of expulsion. Withal I did not take this lesson to heart and for what happened the following year I have no one but myself to blame.

      The significance of the smoking incident for me is that it dashed whatever expectations I still had for an alternative cultural identity--Yussof belonged to a world I wanted no part of--as a result of a carry over vice from a time when I still entertained illusions about my countrymen. I was in an inter-cultural no man's land, still strongly rooted in a culture which produced the freaks at Hellhole, but standing at the door of another culture that wasn't going to open just because I happened to be there expecting admission.

      I read somewhere the argument, used by a man named Gonzalez, that for a foreigner to become a "real" American it was necessary to renounce "allegiance" to any tongue but American English. This prospect apparently led him to attempt suicide, and all things considered who could blame him? Possibly he still retained a foreign accent and couldn't stand the prospect of having to hear the me-Jane-you-Tarzan dialect some Americans recur to when they think some one else is not capable of mangling and twangling the English language. I remember once in Havana using the word "clubby" to a television interviewer and the woman looking at me as if I had spoken in Lower Slobovian and saying: "What?"

      Gonzalez' dilemma was unnecessary because over time it seems the language requirements for American citizenship have been reduced to knowing how to say "yes" and "I do declare", cultural loyalty, even profound psychological yearning, being discounted. Gonzalez became a big-shot intellectual, better known as "Speedy", despite having gotten the differential linguistic treatment--analogically as if a five-year old were taking to a grown man as if he were a one-year old--from the likes of Leduck, a professor I had at Kings who refused to accept I could write a coherent essay on George Moore (he asked me what I meant by "chiaroscuro"). But I snubbed him good one time in class he wondered out loud, with me obviously in my mind, if having English as a second-language made for greater use of clichés and I acted as if I was hard of hearing. Anyway, the answer to that one is either: "I don't know", or: "That is a silly circular question", preferably the latter, for what is a cliché? Assuming command of a language (any language), what would the use of clichés show other than total indifference to originality, like the guy I had seating next to me once during a bumpy plane ride and kept saying: "Shit happens".

Despite strenous gargling, I fail to convince La China to let me kiss her after I vomit in front of her

Outside of The Mount there was no mistaking where I tended. There was then a place in New York, oddly called the Hotel Calendar, where they were very latitudinarian about whom they sold liquor to (maybe in a twisted way an explanation for the name), and also where prostitutes hung around the bar. In sum, it was a huge whorehouse and a half-decent woman who dared put in an appearance there risked having her ass sideswiped by some drunken oaf, as often as not a hooligan from some boarding school or other trying to outdo his buddies in total mindlessness.

      After Carmen Alicia my sexual relations had come to an abrupt and prolonged halt. The Managing Editor's unwitting incitements to masturbation dutifully obeyed were not an adequate substitute. Besides, at The Mount it was something the students, unlike Hellhole's denizens, did not brag about or engage in openly. Thus it was that I became an occasional visitor at the Calendar and it was there that sexual intercourse for me resumed its course, but it did so in most unromantic circumstances, at least the very first time, when after having downed more than a moderate amount of liquor I took a whore called La China to a room and as soon as I entered I had to rush to the toilet and vomit. That didn't dampen my ardour but La China was understandably chary of where I put my mouth, even though I washed it and gargled noisily for her benefit.

      Whores were becoming a secret vice outside of school, especially on trips to The Republic. An acquaintance and I once paired up with an Italian duo--one big, one small, same dress, similar names (Tina and Lina)--for a foursome in bed I didn't see much point to. I was glad I never saw him again.

      The thing is I did not need coaching or leading to seek out whores, so it was to my great surprise, even amazement, that the Managing Editor one day took the trouble of depositing me in front of an apartment building with the specific instruction to visit a certain apartment where I found that a delectable blonde was waiting for me in an unmistakably enticing state of undress. She gave me a such a stupendous working over that, all in all, I enjoyed myself more than I ever had since my torrid encounters with the Taxiarch's maid. The incident has recurred countless times to my memory but it is only now, even as I write these lines, that I understand the Managing Editor was trying to stimulate my heterosexuality and expecting a report from the blonde. Although I have no way of knowing what my grades were, I also have no reason to suspect they were not at the very least satisfactory. Whether that is the way he interpreted them is another question altogether.

      Notwithstanding these shenanigans (mine and the Managing Editor's), the truth is that my life was almost monkish, especially during my senior year at The Mount. This was while living at Thibault's house. I was dedicated exclusively to learning and my position in the list of best students if anything improved. I had little time for social activities, except the obligatory evening hymn-singing sessions at the school chapel when I would sometimes join in with unfeigned enthusiasm, especially on the frequent occasions we were directed to the moving crescendo of "O Lord whose hand is quick to still" culminating in the muted but intense "O hear us when we pray to thee for those in peril on the sea". Perhaps it helped to stir my religious fervour that, as the nearest sea to The Mount was over one hundred miles away and the hymn very likely was composed for fisherfolk in the Outer Hebrides before radio was invented, I was chorusing for something that did not commit me to anything tangible. As a nominal Roman Catholic--atheism was not an acceptable form of belief at The Mount--I was given permission on Sundays to go to a church in Pottyville, which, since I had not recovered my faith after Hellhole, were mostly occasions for stopping in a drugstore and having chocolate ice cream sodas. Improbable though it sounds, these were exactly what their name says, and I actually liked them.

      In my devotion to my studies, I even turned my back on movies and while my room-mates and the rest of the school went to see them at the school auditorium, I stayed at my desk reading and writing and listening to Peter Trough's records of classical music, including Bizet's Carmen. I enjoyed myself so much and I was so at peace, sexual and all other distractions set at rest, that I do not remember ever having written at the time anything that was even remotely related to my own troubled self or the troubled times in the world beyond my room and The Mount.

      My other room-mate was a tall, skinny Mexican named Broomy. He was a good, colorless boy. But Peter was another kettle of fish. He was so handsome and elegant he reminded me of Melvyn Douglas in Ninotchka. He wasn't as good a learner as I was but he was more cultivated. His family was wealthy--they lived in Greenwich, where I had been with Peter during the Christmas recess--and Peter had been a concertgoer in New York. He loved ballet and opera and once told me to my face to stop talking nonsense when I said that Toscanini was the conductor of the New York Philharmonic. I had to take it because I knew I really didn't know what I was saying and the fact was that Toscanini had his own symphony orchestra with NBC.

      On spring-cleaning day, when all the windows in our room, which were of the step-in type from the porch around the front of the house, were opened wide, he played the choral movement from Beethoven's Ninth at full blast and no one complained. I had relicts from my Miami past consisting of some recordings of a music that sounded vaguely Mediterranean, which for some reason always made me nostalgic, and when I tried to do the same thing as Peter, Mrs Thibault--who looked like a woman who would marry a militaristic Frenchman--gave me a frosty look and made deprecatory gestures with her hands and I sincerely understood without need of further insinuations that my stuff was dross next to Peter's gold. After that I went and bought some Richard Strauss and Mozart and Schubert and I never looked back.

Peter and I paint Pottyville red, but he runs like a rabbit and I fall into the clutches of a cop (fortunately myopic)

Unbeknownst to me, and as far as I know to every one else, Peter had a risk-taking, rebellious streak in him, which was to spell doom for me. As to him, I will say below what it led to. What happened was that he proposed that we cut out one night and go into town, which compared to sneaking a smoke in a bedroom was like committing mandatory electric-chair murder in the first degree. Now, this was Pottyville, not Paris or London, not even Philadelphia if it comes to comparisons, and what we would do for fun in that dark, drab place was, incredibly, to have a few beers!

      At first, I demurred but Peter insisted and he capped his inducements by arguing that I deserved a break, which made feel good as it was a tacit recognition of my intellectual superiority. One of the privileges of having such good grades was that I could always study in my own room where as Peter and Broomy were usually consigned to the immense study hall where almost every one else was herded nightly. Broomy, who was also approached by Peter, turned him down flat, which is what I should have done. Instead I wavered, finally consented, and Peter and I "escaped" one night, had a few beers, talked up some girls, horsed around a bit, and returned safely.

      Courting danger can be addictive and Peter and I decided to do a repeat. Everything went more or less like the first time, but on the way back to The Mount we sat in a curb by a corner under a lamp post. It was so stupid that only our half-inebriated state could account for what we were doing. We saw the lights of a car coming up a street and got up and started walking quickly towards The Mount. The car turned the corner and cut us off.

      It was an old pick-up and its driver was an off-duty cop. Quick as a rabbit, Peter ran to the other side of the street, took the corner, and fled into the darkness. The cop couldn't do anything--in effect, Peter had left me in the lurch--but grab a hold of my arm. To say I was in a funk could serve as an unbeatable exemplar of litotes, if my head could have been examined then, which it should have been before I got into that mess. I pleaded with the cop to give me a break, but of course he wouldn't even hear of it, and not being able to imagine what else I could do, I wrested free when I saw the cop had a cosh half out of his pocket and I ran at full speed down the street. The cop then fired two shots at me, but he was a poor marksman, or maybe he too was scared shitless, and missed. I did hear one of the bullets zing against an utility pole, but I was just reacting, not even remotely considering stopping until, after a couple of blocks, I jumped and hid behind a low hedge.

      This was around two in the morning. I lay still for a long time and heard the police cars cruising around. On the way out of The Mount I had twisted a foot and now the pain was getting tough. I wasn't feeling good at all. I mean, just look at me, a foreign honour student in one of the best schools in the United States, a relatively docile person as a rule, being pursued by an entire police department as if I were Edward G. Robinson or James Cagney in one of their mad-beast impersonations. It was like a film situation turned into a personal nightmare. No wonder years later, when I decided to break the routine and start living dangerously, I didn't think that anything worse than what I had lived that night could happen to me. I was wrong.

      I waited for what seemed like ages--and was probably a quarter of an hour--and when I figured the cops might have gone back to their lair (wrong again), I got up and started limping to the school. I hadn't reached the first corner when a car silently approached me and two cops emerged from it and introduced me into the back seat. The jig was up and I imagined that after being handed over to the school I would be expelled and that would be that. But that damned night wasn't yet over for me.

      In the station, and to my complete consternation, the cops started questioning me as if I were a common thief and threatening me with assault charges and time in the pen. This was something I hadn't bargained for and it wasn't sinking in too well. When the cops kept shouting at me, I finally reacted with a political tirade about being treated worse than if I was in the Soviet Union--I could swear now that until that moment the Cold War for me might have been something that was happening in a refrigerator--which the cops didn't take to with good grace and sat me down with a fusillade of blows. This pacified me somewhat--the whole sequence was not unlike my experience previous to doing the Aragonese peasant dance in the Marist school--and I patiently told them who I was and what I was doing and who I was with that night. At that point I wasn't about to take a double rap to leave Peter Trough in the clear.

      To wind up the night's proceedings, the cops finally got the picture and shortly afterwards took me to The Mount. Peter was summoned from class--the crafty devil had managed to return to the school undetected--and the headmaster Mr Grindglass told us that we had done the unforgiveable and there was no more to it. I might have thought at some point I could try arguing that he was making much too much of a fuss over a couple of beers, but just by looking at him at close quarters--on every other occasion he had been at a podium saying banalities to the student body--I knew that he was morally a relative of Yussof, or Thibault for that matter, who had already abjured his errant charges. 

      I do not remember too much about the rest of that day. I must have done everything mechanically, but in any event by nightfall I was in New York, where a search was already under way to find another boarding school where I could get my high school diploma. I went through two more of those charades before I got a contemptible piece of paper saying I had graduated or something to that effect.    The first was called Cheesham and there the headmaster, Mr Scamart, was an unethical shitface who took the Managing Editor's money and then refused to graduate me, and the second one was Milfard, where I was so demoralized I had the humiliating encounter with the moron I tried to cheat in a game. To say I didn't give a damn would be an exaggeration. I was contrite of course and I wrote a lot of suitably remorseful letters, but with my limp foot and my dark mood I mostly felt like Lord Byron. Music was my only consolation in what was a very tight spot, for, as if to expose my derelictions, the way Hester Prynne was forced to wear her scarlet letter, in Cheesham I was segregated with the school's dregs, which happened to be other countrymen, this time lost in the Connecticut wilderness, whose sexual exploits were even more denigrating than those of Cappy and his uncle or cousin and I won't even bother narrating.

      The upshot was that I had fallen so low I looked to my return to The Republic as to a liberation. But this was a false impression. If, as I have said, between the Antihypatus and me it was war, then I had made a terrible tactical error and, far from being free, I was totally in his power. I no longer had the ability to resist him, although, as I showed later, the germ of rebellion was still seething within me, but then later also I discovered that, besides the Antihypatus and the World, I had another enemy to contend with, and this was neurosis. The Managing Editor didn't talk to me for a long time, which was the good part, and when he finally did, it was like a signal for my going on my knees gesture, which naturally went unheeded.

      By pure chance I met Peter later in a street in New York. Like me he was studying at Kings, but whereas I was doing humanities he was studying business administration, which I then thought was a bare notch above a masters in plumbing. I tried to start a conversation about music and he said that for him that had been a long time ago.

      Much later still, after I had quit flying and was stumbling into politics, I got a call and the slurring voice said it was Peter Trough speaking. He told me he was living in Sydney Beach, where I visited him on a trip to Boca Raton. He had done quite well for himself in advertising, had a large house on the Intra-coastal Waterway, and could afford to buy a single-engine Beechcraft for his son. He showed me a small office center he was developing with partners. He and his wife drank a lot and they had in the living room a Wurlitzer and a television set the size of a rhinoceros, which made me think I was in a play by Ionesco. We barely mentioned The Mount. After that I lost touch.

How development economists figured out that a kilo of steel weighs more than a kilo of cotton

The Republic I was returning to was quite different from the one I had left over a decade earlier. The world too had changed. Development economics had been "developing" at a fast rate, which was all that could be said for it. The pioneer in the field was a fellow called Rosenstein-Rodan. He had started his career by proposing large aid programs for the Balkans. The money was to come from the Powers, which was as if you were expecting to found a charity with donations from Scrooge. The mechanisms which would make aid work went by names like "externalities" and "indivisibilities". Unfortunately, the Balkans became off-limits after the war, so Rosenstein-Rodan was recruited by Washington and invited to re-think his theories, which he did by substituting Latin America for Balkans whenever the latter cropped up in his articles. All else remained equal, especially underdevelopment which went on unababated and unresolvable.

      In Washington, or in some way or other connected to Washington, there were other prominent development economists. Most were of the arm-chair persuasion which means they worked in Academia. Their patron saint was Frazer, of Golden Bough-fame, who knew every damn living or unliving tribe on earth without having ever seen Albion's cliffs from the outside. They did occasionally travel to Latin American countries where they huddled with finance and other ministers, who invariably nodded in agreement or provided phony statistics to encourage their guests, as who wouldn't suspecting from the way these visitors talked they just might have the leverage to procure funds for political patronage. I have observed through life that academics, notwithstanding a reputation for self-sufficient love of learning, are obsessive name-droppers, passionately committed to one-up-manship, and that they will react to the most innocent mention of a public personnage as if they had been jolted in the ass with a 10-volt current, the type they use to keep cattle in pens. 

      The most politically powerful of the developmentalists was W.W.Rostow, a favorite of J.F.Kennedy who, apart from having gotten the US into the Vietnam war, invented the "airplane theory" of development, a step-by-step outline of how underdeveloped societies could progress from some lowly peasant stage to economic take-off and on to full flight or industrialization (whichever came first). The majority of development economists believed that peasants were like udders, to be squeezed dry for resources that would generate jobs in cities. This was like communism without the Sovkhozes and the Kolhozes. Cities were crucial. I remember reading once an editorial in a Colombian daily in defense of shantytowns, envisioned as forerunners of suburbia.

      The originality of those ideas was debatable and I knew that politicians in backward countries, who were smart enough to prefer squeezing udders than being udders, had discovered some of them without benefit of American advise or the example of the USSR. For me, this knowledge had the disagreeable consequence that when a benighted economist named Boiler started a lecture on development economics by mentioning Lenin and I offered to straighten him out, he became incensed and ordered me out of his class. I got back at him in my book on the subject in which he was relegated to an ironical footnote.

      Some development economists were out in the field, a badge of merit, although the implication was that they had more time to be around bureaucrats and occasionally got the chance to pontificate before attentive, note-taking locals or were interviewed by US politicos on junkets. One of them called Hirschman always bragged of his years in Colombia, where he was impressed that some natives could pilot airplanes. This started a big debate between partisans of either balanced or unbalanced growth. Balanced growth was the orthodoxy--it sounded much better than unbalanced growth, which suggested non compos mentis--and the latter was a hinky thesis until conciliators (basically editors of collective works, which above all must have lots of pages) said that both expressions meant the same thing.

      Development experts could also be home-grown. Latin America's brightest luminary was Postnick, an Argentine who developed, in collaboration with the American development economist Crooner--this was a sine qua non if a local wanted international prestige--the thesis of unequal exchange, which tried to turn the table on the trick question (for pre-schoolers) of what weighed more, a kilo of cotton or a kilo of steel. The trick to undo the trick was that, obviously, they weighed the same, but the kilo of steel always cost more than the kilo of cotton (other things being equal). Endless reams were squandered on the subject, including the ones I consumed in doing my doctoral dissertation, and as the results of so much research were inconclusive, it turned out that the obvious answer to the trick question was unimpeachably on target.

      The rest of the developing world had its own batch of development economists, such as the Indian Vobiscum--the name itself exudes erudition--who came up with the idea of putting peasants, especially women, to carrying rocks in woven baskets on their heads to build dams and huge steel mills for the Tata family. Another great fieldman was Bomber Byrback, a Swede with time on his hands when his wife was named Ambassador in India, who argued that underdevelopment had nothing to do with economics but with cultural habits and petty corruption and "soft states" and other such ideas. This was the sociological approach and in my research I despised it for no reason other than that it didn't accord with the remainders of my waning socialist beliefs.

      The mistake behind economicist theories on underdevelopment was the curious idea, officially, and only officially, current in Washington and other capitals of the "rich world", that the "elites" in the "third world" did give a damn for the poor. Nobody really believed this, but such is the weight of bureaucracy and officialdom that no one would risk being caught denying it, unless under the influence of alcohol, like the racist freedom rider I alluded to before. It was this misconception also that underpinned dependency theory, the leftist rival of development economics, according to which rulers in developing countries needed lessons from foreign imperialists on how to torture and on how to scam people, which presupposes approximately the same degree of ignorance in politicians as in development economics. The fact is that no one knew how to deal with collective poverty, or cared, and so it was that after I got my degree and my book was published and I tried to get a teaching position in the United States, it took a period of puzzlement and hard reasoning before I caught on that "development" in American universities means fund-raising.

      Whatever the claims of their defenders, doctrines on economic development meant cushy or undemanding jobs in government and they were taken very seriously in The Republic, where the Young Military, now known as Hierarchs, had been in power for some time, although not without hitches, for their ringleader, Colonel Chaufroid, had been bushwhacked by malcontents in cahoots with the second in command, who promptly proclaimed himself Tyrannos Marcus, although he carefullly eschewed any hint of kingdom or empire. When I arrived things were quite placid with more and more oil money coming in, which provided for as many grandiose projects as development economists could imagine even in their most frenzied bacchanals and still left hefty surpluses for Marcus and his fellow Hierarchs.

      Washington, needless to say, was quite pleased, especially as our Tyrannos organized an international congress of mostly Western Hemisphere tinpot dictators in which Guatemala was ostracized and the CIA was tacitly given the go-ahead to overthrow its government with the use of a DC-3 and a P-51. Public floggings were reinstituted in that country. As a historical aside, I understand in a recent plebiscite the practice was sanctioned by the 10% or so of the eligible population which bothered to vote. One lamentable consequence for American plotters was that Che Guevara, who had been travelling the Americas on a motorcycle backseat with a friend who took him along because Guevara's older brother was too busy with his studies, had been working for the Arbenz government in Guatemala, was forced to take refuge in the Mexican embassy, and later joined the Cuban revolution under Castro, who has been screwing the CIA at this writing for the last forty odd years.

Khrushchev's proletarian threats to (1) stuff kitchen ranges into Checker's ass (2) bury Nixon in Checker's plot

In the world at large, the Korean war had ended in a draw with Communist China. Much despised Third World peasants had shown they weren't just cows' udders in a remote Vietnamese valley called Dien Bien Phu, where the French had told them more or less: "C'mon, put up your dukes, put up your dukes!", and got their stuffing knocked out. I felt sorry for the French, whose post-war defeat was like a victim cursing his fleeing assailant and being jailed for disturbing the peace, but I was more impressed by the Vietnamese communists and this was to colour deceptively the way I would tend to see world politics in the future.

      That it was the French who got it in Vietnam, and not, say, the British, might have led the Americans to think it was not so much a victory for the Vietnamese as a defeat of a weak power, and this could have made them overconfident about their ability to get things under control in that country. Another possible ingredient for the Vietnamese fiasco was that it fitted perfectly the Truman doctrine, which had worked like a charm in Greece. If that was the case, then American foreign policy was indeed in the hands of numbskulls--or more kindly, neurotics--because everyone knew that Stalin had given up Greece in exchange for the rest of the Balkans and if the State Department thought otherwise it was falling for its own propaganda. Vietnam was in the future anyway.

      In America, McCarthy drank himself to death but not before a lot of Jews lost their jobs in Hollywood and moved to New York or Europe. From cinematic depictions of this hounding, the ones who really got it in the neck were the no-talents who would probably be having trouble getting work even without McCarthy. Stalin, who died in bed, was placed in a crystal case next to Snow White. After a purge of some unsavory-looking characters like Beria and Malenkov, Khrushchev became chairman of the Communist Party of the USSR, which was to the government as in times gone by the Shoguns were to the Emperors in Japan. The West took its hat off to him when he denounced the crimes of Stalin, but put it back on when the pudgy Soviet leader took off a shoe in the United Nations and made a disgraceful show of proletarian etiquette: he banged his desk with it as hard as he could when he heard a speech he didn't like. To make matters worse, he told vicepresident Nixon he could stuff his refrigerators and kitchen ranges into Checkers' ass. In another version, what he said was that when he (Nixon) died he (Khrushchev) would have him buried in Checkers' plot, not very nice coming from the leader of a country who maintained a committee of medical specialists to look after the mummies of its murderous despots.

      As for me back in The Republic, I was put in the same Marist school I had attended many years before, whose corridors had echoed to my unavailing cries for help against the Antihypatus. After the harrowing I went through in Pottyville and Cheesham, it was almost a relief to be there. Besides, my family had scaled many rungs in the economic ladder and that, plus the social prestige that came with it, meant I didn't have to take any crap from the likes of the scions of Krueger beer or the Pennsylvanians.

      The Marists themselves, who were different from the slap-happy Falangists of my childhood, were definitely an improvement over Yussof and Thibault, not to mention the priggish headmaster at The Mount and the cheating shitface at Cheesham. In sum, I had forgotten my trials and tribulations at Hellhole High and I was taking it easy. There was a hint of trouble when I said Nebuchadnezzar and my classmates burst out laughing--in Spanish it is pronounced more like Nabucco--and I also remember I was reading a book on abnormal psychology by Katryin Hardon which I don't know where I got--it could have been given to me by some perceptive soul I had come across in my peregrinations--and I had the strange sensation of finding in it descriptions which were more than vaguely reminiscent of myself. I recall I read the word dementia and I consulted the head brother at the school and he told me: "Don't give it a thought", which sounded very wise as I suspected I was not truly mad. Still and all, I was something others weren't and this became very noticeable as my studies in my homeland proceeded and I began observing the strange ways of the locals, for definitely in my case to be back in The Republic was not exactly the return of the native.

      The first Christmas I spent there I suffered an attack of appendicitis and was operated right smack on New Years eve. This happened in the same hospital where the obstetrician had struggled to deliver me, which you might recall I described as being anything but a deliverance. It was also next to a basilica consecrated to the Local Virgin--in the Holy Mother of God sense of course--in a cozy neighborhood where many immortal furro-masterpieces were begotten, so I presume the parish priest was expected to contribute to the festivities, which he did by having the church bells peal past the count of twelve and uninterrupedly into the wee hours. Most fitting on the occasion, when I came to I asked for wine, a surprising request as I had never drunk the stuff, but I wasn't about to get any that night, which I spent awake and wondering when those damn bells were going to stop ringing.

Having the memory capacity of a first generation laptop does not necessarily mean you're stupid

My only visitor during my hospitalization--in those times you weren't suppose to jump out of bed and do calisthenics the moment a surgeon put in the last stitch--was a distant cousin called Marius Whittier. Now, Marius had the memory capacity of a first-generation laptop, but he was a horny bastard--he's the one who told me of the delights of tree-branch masturbation and semen-spitting contests--and he became my cicerone to the whorehouses in town.

      You will now have to excuse me if I get a mite rhapsodic. I know true Christians--especially Anabaptists, although they did have a field day in Münster--might consider me a monster, but I have enjoined myself in these memoirs to be true to my past no matter how shameful or sordid it might superficially appear. The names themselves of the brothels were memorable and just before I go to meet my Maker or whoever I will not be surprised if by happenstance some of them came to my mind. They ranged from the rhythmic Tibiritabara--which I know is not easy to pronounce in English, but which, take my word, sounds like Caribbean drumming in the finest style (you'll be wondering what happened to Schubert, but please be patient)--to the bucolic Bello Monte--something like "lovely wilds", with the added pun on Monte Veneris--to the classical Atlantis or Acropolis.

      The latter was heaven on earth. It was built on a hill overlooking the Straits and had a portico with columns, which is how it got the name. It was open to the night breezes reaching into the large inner patio, where there was always live music, and the tables were chock-a-block with what, for lack of a better sounding name, I must call prostitutes. These girls--and they were usually young, except for some oldies who sneaked in past the management but compensated with exceptional know-how--were on average real lookers, so much so that they did not need to be all over the punters as they arrived but waited for overtures, usually an invitation to dance. Beats me how there were so many of them. On second thought, it must have been the oil money flowing all over the place and my momentary lapse is probably due to not remembering the rednecks who surely were there and I hadn't noticed, as who would in the circumstances.

      The Acropolis was the sort of place you could go to just to spend the night cradling a drink and staring at the "action", which never in my experience got out of hand--of course I didn't go there every night--although detached behavior of that kind sometimes bugged the more uppity sluts who could go straight to you and ask impertinent questions such as if you were somebody's chauffeur. Remembering father-figure André that didn't bother me too much and I just shrugged or told them: "So what? You needing a gear shift or something?" The Acropolis was in a fairly isolated part of town, near a brewery whose cane-sugary aromas sometimes wafted in with the wind, but the Tibiritabara was different. It was better known and neighboured on similar establishments and it was usually crowded to the rafters with couples dancing and toing and froing the rooms in the back.

      Marius introduced me to the night life but afterwards I didn't need him to show me the way any where, especially after the night he borrowed money from me to have one of the girls in Bello Monte and then kept using his bad memory as an excuse for not paying back, which goes to show that dumb is not necessarily stupid. Marius in time became a lawyer who got a job in government and made some money. He was an alcoholic and his two wives left him. His life was going down the drain until my homeopathic physician Rickety, whose success had been accompanied by an increasing fondness for the bottle, convinced him to join Alcoholic Anonymous, where both in succession found their deep-down vocations.

      I could do an inventory of all the places I visited in those years, but what would be the point? Sure The Acropolis was a great experience, multi-dimensionally, even aesthetically, sensuous, but the bottom line is that a poontang house is a poontang house and there is just so much I can say about them, save maybe to recall the exquisite young whore who did this to me or the oldie who went about it in some particularly obscene way. These experiences are not carved in stone, as in Khajuraho, which is the closest in art I have been to The Acropolis, and these confessions were not conceived to compete with the Kama Sutra. Besides, there is the significant detail that there were always female servants in our house and offhand I cannot recall one I did not put my hands on and subsequently visited in her own room--our servants' quarters unlike those I have seen in other Third World countries were comparable to small hotel rooms--all of which is by way of saying I was a very sexually precocious and active young man. 

      Of course, so much sex on the sleaze did make me somewhat shy around girls my age I could not simply fondle and get a smile and a come-on in response, and this resulted in that I felt a special solidarity with my uncle Gilbert, the fiancé of the mustachioed lady, whom also I had seen at his shyest in Miami with an attractive married woman whose husband treated her like dirt and Gilbert could have had if he had just opened his mouth and said: "Howdy". This shyness in me was to be fundamental in the lightning-bolt experience I had one night not long before I was unexpectedly accepted at Kings and had to leave The Republic once again, this time in a cultural sense for keeps.

The upright Pole who became an uptight English and the fat actor who went barefoot because he did not become President

I might be giving the wrong impression in having commenced talking about sexual experiences because back in The Republic, much of my time as before was spent in studies, first, in the Marist school, and later in a lyceum or high school. The latter was named after Barrault, the first native historian after independence from Spain, who also researched and wrote in Spain, and who laid the foundation for the national mythology, in which one Plainsman could lick ten Spaniards with one hand tied to his dick. In this mythology also the small consumptive Liberator was superior to Spiderman and Captain Marvel rolled into one (he did not, for starters, have to say Shazam). If a person even as much as dared doubt he was not perfect in all respects, he could be given the sort of get-the-hell-out response foreigners in America received if they disagreed about flying saucers and how commies were fluoridizing water supplies. Even his moral weaknesses were superlative and his prowesses with women, for example, were supposed to be such that Casanova in comparison was an underachiever and the "Madamina" aria could have been about population statistics.

      The hormonal thing down there was taken very seriously and the all-time best-selling author, Francisco Locksmith, wrote fictionalized history in which the male characters were either rapists or despots. This writer was a psychiatrist of the Spanish school who required his patients to undergo a hormonal count before he treated them. If they did not come up to snuff, he gave them a disdainful look and told them to come back another time. His first books were treatises in which, starting from the premise that immigrants were psychotic and using statistics about the small number of Spaniards that had left their country to conquer the New World, he argued that his countrymen were insane, but Locksmith was not considered a serious historian. For that, it was universally agreed you had to be a Marxist, which goes to show the psychiatrist was not entirely devoid of common sense.

      Espousing Marxism meant adhering to a host of other myths overlaying the fundamental ones about the skinny Liberator and other figures from the past among which one called Guzman Bento had the privilege of being considered a "progressive" because he issued a decree mandating free, universal education in a country in which there weren't ten kilometers of decent roads and foreign loans, guaranteed by arbitrary customs levies, went into the pockets of the negotiators and the Tyranni, especially Guzman Bento himself. Guzman Bento was a character in Conrad's Nostromo. Conrad was an uptight Pole who discovered his vocation in being an uptight Englishman. He was the founder of Costaguana but later became famous as the scriptwriter for Apocalypse Now, a film about the Philippines and Marlon Brando, a fat actor who went around in his bare feet because he did not become president like What's-His-Name.

      Even though in thinking back I am sometimes tempted to appraise my return to The Republic as lost years, this view is not justified on various counts, but it would be unjustified if only because it got me started in philosophy despite the fact that my introduction to metaphysics and ontology was in the hands of a Cuban exile who might not have known what he was talking about, because what he did was memorize entire sections of Jon Mares and Gracie Rantes, authors of the standard histories of philosophy in Spanish at the time. For relaxation this man read comic-books, which is not per se intellectually demeaning. "Peanuts" was the subject of a theological treatise and Donald Duck, though not Mickey Mouse or Goofy, has been the object of wrathful analyses by illustrious southern-cone Marxists. But I am certain my own philosophy teacher then had no such objectives despite looking in his undershirt while reading his comic books like a tropical Aristotle gazing at the bust of Homer. I must also add that Mares, a figure I tended to consign to minordom, later suprised me with an essay in Les Nouvelles Lettres on Wittgenstein, the reading of which, possibly because of its obscurity and existentialist emphasis on nothingness, left with me the mistaken impression I had entered the inner sanctum of wisdom, comparable to the unutterable and incomprehensible Masonic thirty-third degree or the obscure rites associated with being inducted into a Lions Den.

      I will shortly refer to other reasons I have to cherish those years in The Republic, but before I must continue the review of my education there. After I finished a year with the Marists--their school did not have the fifth and final year of secondary education--I transferred to the Lyceum and there it was that I began to have second thoughts about my place in that society. The Lyceum was large, possibly over a thousand students, and it had the reputation of having the best teachers around, thoroughly undeserved as the staff included the Cuban expat I mentioned above, although admittedly there might not have been any one else in the city with enough background to memorize second-hand philosophy and regurgitate it with a least a modicum of coherence.

      The teaching of literature could be compared, for an avid reader like me, to a strip-tease. The wonders of Spanish letters, from El Cid to the famous "generation of 98"--in English it sounds like something an atomic reactor might do as a sideline, but in Spanish "generación del 98" has an unmistakable ring to it--were expounded in textbooks with basic biographical and chronological references leading to chrestomathies that contained bare snatches of the originals. It was somewhat as if a hack took it upon himself to paraphrase Pericles' or Churchill's more memorable speeches.

      The teaching of Latin was compulsory. However, there was an underside to this. Our professor of Latin at the Lyceum was an orotund, sun-browned patrician type named Montero who really did know his Virgil and Cicero. His favourite was Horace and he himself composed absolutely perfect eclogues, which were published in the local press at the unfailing rate of one a week. This means that if he lived to be seventy, assuming he knew his Latin well from the age of twenty, he wrote enough of them to fill 1,300 pages of poetry! Since on the pastoral theme what he did was substitute Horace's flora and fauna for their tropical counterparts, Montero must surely qualify as a unoriginal genius of sorts, but he was as execrable as a teacher as he was a peerless admirer of Roman literature.

      Montero, who was old-fashioned, as you might have surmised, would always dress in the manner of the abolished ranks, save that he liked to use light-blue cotton shirts, instead of the reglamentary white, with his baggy sharkskins. I had heard stories which I didn't believe until one day I saw him roll up the sleeves of his suit and shirt to reveal to one of my classmates a parade of watches from his wrist up. One of my fellow classmates was a hotel manager--I don't remember now why he wanted a Lyceum degree, because all he did with it was hang it on the wall behind the front desk--and he needed bolts of clothing for his waiters, which he bought from Montero and got a perfect 100 in the final. The latter was so easy anyway I could muddle through it without having paid more attention to Montero's lectures than I would have if a goat, one of his favorite poetic subjects, had stood in front of the class and bleated.

      Other teachers would pass students for a straight fee. The more conscientious ones would try to get as many tutorships as possible, which meant that afterwards they were hardly about to fail the ones who had taken their private classes. All of these teachers, who were a strange mixture of the vocational and the cynical, were being paid wages that a latrine-cleaner in an oil company camp would despise in a country which from a 90% illiteracy rate was probably down to maybe 70%.

      This situation, combined with other deterring influences, such as sexual and other dalliances, engendered in me the reproachable habit--I have to confess that I benefited at least once from my teachers' venality--of pursuing studies that had to do with strong personal interests rather than accepting the discipline that goes with schooling, which requires learning not only what you like but what you must whether you like it or not. Part of this inexcusable attitude was begotten from my growing obsession with my own self, but part also came from the trouble I was having taking seriously a school where teachers acted like street vendors and students could suddenly revert to behaviour next to which the jungle tribes that were still skewering missionaries in not so remote jungles of The Republic were a model of Hochkulturen.

The Living dead at the Lyceum try to lynch the young man in the vaquero boots

One unforgettable afternoon the student body in the Lyceum was milling about during a recess and a young man in a bright new coupé arrived at the school with an attractive girl on each arm. He was wearing high vaquero boots and a hat. To be honest, I didn't even notice his arrival and I know he was wearing boots but I may be making up the part about the hat. Anyway, apparently one of my fellow students noticed the boots and surreptitiously pointed them out to some one else who might have said something to another and before you knew it the trio had a crowd following them.

The young man and his girl friends at first tried to ignore the others, but the bigger the crowd got, and it seemed to attract students from all over the place, the noisier and rowdier it became and soon it began to look like a lynch mob. The dumbfounded and justifiably preoccupied young man saw the way things were going and he grabbed his girl friends and rushed to his car. The mob were over it, like living dead--although they were not brain eaters but seemed to have had their brains eaten--and when the driver headed towards the gate the horde of savages actually ran and tried to prevent him from leaving. I had never then and I have never since witnessed such a spectacle. I have to confess that it was so preposterous, I had to laugh, but I wasn't laughing because that specific spectacle was funny: I was laughing because I was living a joke, although a more accurate appraisal of the situation, not then within my reach, would have been that I was inside a collective neurosis, possibly even psychosis, very nearly a vindication of old Locksmith's weird psycho-social thesis.

Despite all that, my plans were to go to The Republican Central University. How was this possible? This question, which I now ask in genuine wonderment, did not even come into my mind then. A joke is not a bad place to be in, if it is a good joke, especially because in it you don't have to take anything seriously, and what cause did I have to be serious about anything? In my experience, marriage and parenthood were suspect, possibly farcical. Marius, my closest friend, was as intelectually stimulating as mucus and his one drive in life was how he could get it from the whores for free. The culture was not one I could identify with. There were some literary types at the Lyceum, but they were "surrealists", which was a superannuated excuse for writing "poetry" that didn't rhyme, which they couldn't. Later in life I had a friend, Cesar Cornerio, whose great parlor trick after a drink or two was declaiming in free association, which seemed to leave people agape. With such devices he made a fine career from himself at the university, but I suspect he must have known that everything around him was a sham and he drank himself to death. 

      My relations with the Managing Editor in particular were not especially conducive to constructive social attitudes. To put it briefly, I was indentured to him, so my life was pretty much what he wanted it to be, yet since I saw him only infrequently I had no visible outlets for my grudges, except maybe my mother, and she was so good at playing the martyr it would have been an unconceivable crime for me to blame her for anything. I had discovered Catch-22 before Heller invented it. I mean, Heller's was a publicity stunt. My situation was real. It was so real I even refused the Managing Editor's invitation to go to Europe with him and preferred to stay in The Republic, where I was doing exactly nothing, just to avoid the fidgets by being around him. I did accompany him on the boat trip to New York which wasn't too bad because I was the only young man aboard and among the other passangers there were two lovelies I courted alternatively, finally plumping for a luscious blonde from Virginia, whom I could not convince to stay with me in New York, where I spent two lonely and depressing days.

      The height of the reciprocal alienation between the Managing Editor and me, which ironically took place in a most civilized dialogue and concluded on a note of unspoken and friendly agreement, occurred when I gave him a detailed account of how much educating me had cost him in dollar terms. I do not remember the exact figure but it was quite low, a fraction of what I knew he had to be making, and he sketched the barest hint of a smile with his nearly lipless mouth. I think it was because that showed I was not the utter fool he thought I was.

      This is by way of explaining why, one, I did not believe that life was to be taken seriously, and two, the sooner I cut the links to my ab origine family the better; and as I was not expecting that my overtly biculturalist way of life would be repeating itself any time in the foreseeable future, sooner meant Republican Central University and a law degree. It did not matter that I had to live with people either hanging from tree branches or behaving like troglodytes. I was inured to that sort of thing and I had a highly developed sense of humour. I could hear the jokes and bend over backwards with laughter and I would keep my own private world intact and impenetrable, the way it had gone through my early felodese games, Hellhole High, The Mount, the police station in Pottyville, Cheesham Academy, and the Lyceum. While I laughed out loud, or was laughed at, I was smiling inside at the folly of it all. Now, this wasn't so bad and it explains why I could face a future in The Republic without fear and trembling. There was another and powerful reason I did not mind staying in The Republic and it was my love of nature.

In the guise of Don Quijote, I travel The Republic with a famished gorilla   

I have not mentioned this before--although I did allude to the numinous mornings in the Andean village--because talk of nature can get treacly, but I promise I won't get romantic with those of you still following the ups and downs of my life. The Straits I have referred to before were a wide neck of water from the sea to a large gulf, which was erroneously called a lake and as such it figures in all Atlases. The city I lived in--which was also the setting of Nostromo, as I convincingly argued in a long essay I published during my days as literary critic--was spread out along the western shoreline of the Straits. The wind and the clouds always came from the east across the Straits. The approach of huge anvil-heads was an other-wordly experience which I can only compare to the day the Deluge started, except that this show lasted only a couple of hours and ended in dull, grey, oppressive heat.

      Before the city grew and giant petrochemical complexes were built on the other side of the Straits, you could see so many stars they clustered like the balls of fire in van Gogh's painting of the night sky in Provence. The countryside was flat and semi-arid with lots of cactus and short gnarled ironwood trees. There was a road to the south and the first time I travelled it I was amazed when I saw in the distance the endless bluish outline of mountains I had heard of but did not believe could be so impressively high. I knew they were all jungle and that only untamed Amerindians lived in them, but I longed to enter and cross them and find what lay behind them. This is a feeling that mountains always inspire in me, but in this instance it led to the project of doing a trip around The Republic, which I had considered many times when I was in the throes of my biculturalist struggles in America.

      The Managing Editor, in one of those gestures which can still now and then redeem him in my sight, not only made no objections--in fact, he said nothing--but gave me the nod and lent me a car and his driver, whose name was Sanchez, but in my notes--I had begun keeping a gappy kind of diary--went by the name of Sancho Panza. I was neither old nor mad enough for the role of Don Quijote, but I had not yet discovered the impostures concerning this fictional character and I was vaguely casting myself as an idealist in search of adventures. Sanchez, on the other hand, was made for the role of Don Quijote's companion as he was shrewd and tough--he could eat rotten stew as if it was chocolate pudding and he could down more bananas than a really famished gorilla--and he was the soul of prudence. When I wanted to take risks he would mull it over and put his foot down and I would not insist, which means I wasn't a very good Quijote and he was much superior to the proverb-spewing but ineffectual Panza.

      Since this is not a travel book--God forbid!--I will only mention some highlights and impressions. The best was the gravel road to the 16,000-foot high "Eagle Pass", which got its name from a pedestal at its summit crowned by a bronze condor. My countrymen were not very good at ornithology. They had so little interest in birds they either ate them or locked them up, like the real condor I once saw imprisoned in a large canary cage in a torrid, filthy little town next to a large muddy river. At first I thought it was a buzzard and of course wondered at the oddity until my companion said in my ear: "Shit, man, that's a damned condor!"

      The Republic's roads at the time were mostly what they called "improved surface", but you had to credit Tyrannos Marcus with building lots of them and we were able to drive to the edges of the territory where the roads ended and real, untamed wilderness began. Marcus had also constructed modern hotels in different places at large regular intervals, so our overnight stays were only occasionally rough. In one of those hotels, near the sea, I fell asleep to the sound of the waves and the breeze among the palm trees. When I woke up the sheet was covered by small blood spots with the tiny telltale black dot of mosquitoes squashed in the middle of their digestion.

My hunting days are over when a Great Dane lays a pile in the middle of our camp

My former homeland could be delightful then, as it was for a time later when I cottoned to a group of hunters, bought a 12-gauge Beretta, and accompanied them on their trips. This was not so much for the hunting itself as to visit the places they went to, which usually meant taking dirt roads, camping out, and hiking a lot. I was never a good hunter and seldom used my gun, but I will say that thanks to this unsavory association I got to know unforgettable places such as a large, reedy, clear-water swamp where mallards stopped in their twice-yearly migrations--and got slaughtered in the thousands when imprudently they emerged from their hiding places at dawn and dusk--and a despicable caricature of a water hole, surrounded by stunted, denuded, thorny trees, where chirping and whistling and clucking and twittering birds with plumages of all conceivable colours congregated in such numbers that birdwatchers, who normally would have had us shot on sight, would have licked our asses to be in our places.

      I broke with the hunters after a time--to be quite honest, I never liked them--and later I heard of the curious ways two of them had ended. The leader of the group, a "gun-wise" Colombian called Munevar, blew half his face off. By accident! The other was found dead in some out of the way place in his four-wheel drive car. There were no signs of violence. He was justing sitting there lifeless, sprawled on the steering wheel with his gun beside him. The mystery was solved when a sample of his blood was sent to a laboratory and the analysis showed he must have died from an allergic reaction to the poison of a prickly plant. Despite many years of traipsing and killing, he never knew what did him in.

      I hunted again for a time in Costaguana, when I was courting Gina, my second wife, and was so infatuated I accompanied members of her family, avid hunters and drinkers, in their outings. As before, there were some good moments, like walking in the woods and suddenly finding myself under a canopy of high branches filled with hundreds of silent, staring monkeys. Other monkeys, big, red, and bearded, formed large packs and roared in the distance like panthers. But this time around I reached a point when I became nauseated and gave up hunting for good.

      In part I was nauseated at myself: for the wanton killing of a stork one day I was walking alone and the poor bird just happened to be there and for the young buck--he was barely sprouting horns--I light-blinded one night and shot and watched as he vainly tried to kick death away. I wish I could say it was remorse that got me, but the truth is I got sick and tired of Gina's family, who were the all-time champion dirtbags. They were capable of shooting howler monkeys for sport, and laugh while doing it. They would drink anything, sometimes mixing whisky and rhum and even rubbing alcohol, and they were so filthy one morning out in some flat country I woke up and found in the middle of camp a huge pile of crap that might have been left by a Great Dane. I suspect it was the father of my future wife, a bald, foul-mouthed old man who relished wrestling down mangy dogs to smear them with some purple stuff he also got all over himself, and I did not want any more bad omens about my romance. Besides, the best moments in the wilderness or taking any track you could put wheels on had nothing to do with hunting.

      Outside of the untoward incidents at the Lyceum and elsewhere nothing troubled the placidity of my life, so I could not claim I was unhappy. Pushkin was my loyal companion while I read or wrote or just mused by myself in the library of our family's large early-50s house. He never left my side and only took to the streets when I wasn't around. He usually just lay there sleeping, twitching his large floppy ears when he dreamt--although I had his tail cropped in the Doberman Pinscher style, his ears were not mutilated because he had almost died in the tail-cutting operation--and would occasionally rouse himself, yawn, and go back to his slumber, unless he heard Fidelio, upon which he would come fully awake and start howling as if he were practicing in the wings for his entry as Pizarro. About music, on which I promised an explanation before, it is true I did enjoy the Latin syncopations in the cathouses--the punters there were not as a rule in the mood for Lieder or for Mendelssohn--but I had by then amassed a rather large collection of classical music and I never heard anything else if I had a choice, which was always I wasn't around whores, and that was really most of the time.

      The books in the library were mostly the Managing Editor's and they were an idiosyncratic collection which reflected his various career turns with many of them bought mainly to fill the shelves, but not by the yard, for after all he was an educated man, professionally savvy but not much given to reading and very limited in the scope of his interests. The core was formed by multi-volumed legal works beautifully bound. To these he had added textbooks which he had studied in Madrid and summarized such subjects as Spanish history, world history, politics, something vaguely called "culture", and tauromachy. The Managing Editor had also bought the complete works of authors like the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, a thinker who went for relativism because he thought it meant you should not badmouth your relatives, and the biographers Emil Ludwig and Stefan Zweig. These fellows were outmoded but entertaining, very much old-world types, and Zweig at least so committed to his Western roots he and his wife committed suicide in Petropolis because they construed the Second World War as the breakdown of civilization.

      The Managing Editor also seemed to have a curious predilection for Lin Yutang and for Herman Hesse. Like Ludwig and Zweig, they were best sellers in their time. Lin Yutang was an ersatz Chinaman who wrote about the meaning of life, but the Managing Editor never read him, which was like treasuring a large collection of cookbooks and having a thing for hot dogs. Hesse he didn't read either, but that was perfectly understandable because Hesse, Nobel Prize and all, was so boring he could have put Cerberus to sleep, or turned Medusa into a panic-stricken milkmaid. Hesse was also Marius' favorite author, a freakish facet of my friend's personality, which was the reason I read Hesse myself. What really intrigued me was the Nobel Prize he had been awarded for his novels, which were interminable disquisitions on the cardboard symbols he used, as if instead of Titus Andronicus Shakespeare had written an essay on how to cook and serve your enemies, or as if Goethe's Faust was a treatise on  the misadventures of a lecherous, swell-headed grump. My own contribution to the library was modest but it was consistent with my immediate interests, which, at least philosophically, went beyond what the Managing Editor could even conceive.

On my way to a swimming pool I get hit by a lightning bolt, an experience which understandably marks me for life

In doing this brief description of our library, it is only fitting I should admit that my contented detachment was made possible by my father's wealth. Since there is no way that one can separate a life from its concrete circumstances, as even the most rabid non-determinist must admit, this statement does not rise above mere truism, and this means that the ways we found to hassle each other were as inevitable as our respective births. Although he achieved many things in his own life, from an interpersonal, father-son perspective he was born to screw me and I was born to bugger him and we could do no more to prevent this than I could have done to prevent him marrying my mother. Of course, he started it, but he could do nothing about that, and if I am at least partly responsible for his life, I cannot say that I could have avoided doing what I did to him. But this is a rather complex issue and this is not the moment to deal with it.

      My immediate concern is that, however profound my detachment and however strong my feelings of intellectual superiority, I still had to accept that I was not living in a place where I truly wanted to live. My dilemma took multiple forms. I did not really know where I belonged. Ironically, I was driving around in a Buick (long u) which the fools around me were calling Buick (like tweak or squeak), and this jarred. Who the hell was I, I kept asking myself. Certainly not the patriotic pipsqueak who had put Panky in his place many years before, but I wasn't the ingenuous would-be American who had arrived at The Mount thinking I was back among my own either.

      Sad to say, I still cannot claim to belong anywhere in a way that my claim could not be disputed by others. Listening to the "Enigma Variations" one night recently, and feeling somewhat absurdly British, I remembered John Burst, a landlord I had in Kensington and all in all a decent fellow, and the alarmed expression he had when I told him jokingly I was going to do a rummage sale from my car's boot in Paddyworth Square. But then poor John, so really really English he would dress for every occasion, like wearing a silly short-brimmed hat at the Newmarket race-course or plus-fours at St. Andrews, the last I heard was being chased by Inland Revenue for some income tax forms in which they smelled a rat, so he is not perhaps the best arbiter of proper Britishness. I don't mind others' stereotypes or what I am or I am not, but back in the time I am narrating this heterotopia was always in the back of my mind until the night it hit me like a lightning bolt and changed my life forever regardless of how much externally it went on being for many years subject to the capricious designs of the Managing Editor.

      The incident in itself was the heart of triviality. I did not give it much importance and it is over the years that it has acquired the biographical significance I now confer upon it. I mentioned that my somewhat slinky sexual habits had contributed to making me shy in, how could I say it?, more "respectable social circles". That particular night I was feeling bored and I thought of going swimming in an exclusive club we belonged to--the one in which my former classmate, millionaire Ramon, still plays dominoes--but as I was leaving in my car with my swimming trunks and a towel I became paralyzed with indecision. I was literally afraid of going to that perfectly harmless place and being seen by whoever might have been there, probably no one since it was rather late. I considered visiting one of my nighttime haunts, but I did not have the taste for that and again my will did not respond.

      It was a curious situation indeed and one I did not like one bit. Normally I would have been content in my solitude, but this time it felt like a trap from which I thought I could not escape hard as tried. This is a bit of an exaggeration and I know I could have forced myself to go anywhere I wanted, but it was the uncomfortable feeling that went with having to bring myself to do anything which was stirring things inside my brain. One self-evident thought, which I didn't relish, was that my detachment from my surroundings was not as complete as I thought; and if my feeling of detachment went, then my intellectual pride could also be in jeopardy. I mean, I was non-chalant about the opinions' of others because of my own exalted opinion of myself, but if the opinions of others counted, then I could possibly be wrong about myself. I know now I wasn't, but my mood at that moment was one of weakness and insecurity.

      So I went back into my den and consigned on paper what I considered an accurate description of my state of mind. The result did not include an explanation and it was then I had the thought that the rest of my life would have to be devoted to explaining what was happening to me at that moment. It might seem that there was a huge disproportion between that trivial incident and the momentous decision I was making, but, even though it did not occur to me then, there was no disproportion at all, because I had my wits about me and I did have a special grasp of things and I knew the task I was assigning myself was of such complexity that it would take a lifetime to fulfill; and this was terribly discouraging considering that what had set off the process that night was, give me a break, the desire to take a dip in a swimming pool.

      I said I did not then give the incident that much importance and this was true to the extent that all I did was jot down some lines and later I went to bed and slept as well as any other night. My life did not change one bit. I still thought I was definitely not home but in the place where willy-nilly I had to go on living and so my previous practical projects and calculations were intact. I had not counted on Teresa Hunt Lodge, though strictly speaking it had nothing to do with this woman, whoever she was, but, judging from the surname, with some Boston Brahmin with an unconventional sense of his social obligations.

I get my marching orders to New York and promptly fall into a diabolical trap

The Hierarchs had allowed the Lawyer into the newspaper business because they knew he didn't pose a threat even though he had been in the Dynasts' ranks. This seeming contradiction--all contradictions in politics, by the way, are always "seeming"--arose from that the Politicians had taken the blame for the overthrow of Meca and when the Military kicked them out they also signalled that the Dynasts' partisans were now in their good graces. The former Magister and clever, well-remunerated Lawyer now showed that he was also a talented Managing Editor and in no time had increased tenfold the circulation of what was essentially a party-rag. He did it by buying a second-hand rotative press and by making lots of space for the police beat and enough gore to satisfy the most demanding ghoul. No matter how simple-minded this recipe may sound, the fact remains that he applied it with a great deal of success.

      The Managing Editor, again very much to his credit, was a man of deep-down democratic persuasions and he was not pleased by the proclamation of Tyrannos Marcus. When the latter, after about five years of military rule and unswerving adherence to developmentalist nostrums, decreed elections--excluding his former partner, now bomb-throwing communist Romulus (in the official version)--it was because he believed he had the electorate in his pocket. But my countrymen didn't care squat for developmentalism. What they remembered was that under the Politicians all they needed to get a job in government was to know how to read and write, which sometimes they could fake by learning to scribble a semblance of a signature, whereas Tyrannos Marcus was very proud of his slipshod education--he once told a reporter that Rome's greatest legacy was the aqueduct in Segovia--and he liked to surround himself with toadies who had been to Europe, so the "people" wanted the Politicians back. Period.

      Serious poll-taking was only catching on in America and it was mostly anecdotal folderol where I came from. Given censorship, the Managing Editor could not openly side with the "people", but he used party symbols and other clever tricks to let the readership know he was with the Politicians. Anyhow, the elections results were like telling Tyrannos Marcus that he was a fat medal-wearing maggot, which was true enough but not likely to induce in him democratic sentiments, so he shut down the country for a couple of days and when he opened it again, hey presto!, he had won by an overwhelming majority.

      Newspapers were closed of course and the Managing Editor was jailed twenty-four hours--an experience he did not relish--and the newspaper circulated once again. The secret police must have noticed that my father was phobic to torture, an understandable weakness he admitted quite openly, once recounting that an officer, known for his conspirational proclivities, had approached him in an airport and my father had said before the other could even open his mouth: "Don't tell me any secrets! I don't want to hear any secrets!" I wouldn't even dream of censuring the Managing Editor for this, for from personal experience I know jail stinks and, although conceivably adrenalin could have led me to acts of defiance, I also know it would soon have ebbed and I would have been left in a state of utter devastation. Worse perhaps than the fear of intense physical pain--certain experiences have shown me I tend to exaggerate it--is my claustrophobia, which is usually under control but which stories of Allied prisoners stuffed into boxes by sadistic Japanese jailors will stimulate so that my hands look as if they had hogged all the sweat glands in my body. 

      The upshot for the Managing Editor of the electoral fraud in The Republic was that the judges of the Teresa Hunt Lodge Award for Courageous Journalists took note of his democratic stance and, as his political background did not offer any evidence of flirting openly or otherwise with communists, he was awarded the prize, which was sponsored by a dependency of Kings College, and that is where I come in, or rather, when, without being consulted, my future was once more decided for me, although as Dear Reader (if you permit the familiarity) by now will realize I was set on doing my own deciding on what my life was about and the external circumstances were of no importance whatever.

      When I got my new marching orders, I didn't complain or even make a token gesture of protest. It was bye-bye to my plans for independence but I knew a law degree wasn't really going to further my self-knowledge goal or strengthen my grasp on philosophical concepts. Also, I hadn't been so befuddled by my stint in The Republic I could not understand New York had a lot to offer me. What I did not know, and what if I had would not have led to my meek acceptance of this unexpected turn of events, was the diabolical plan that the Managing Editor and his wife had in store for me. "Diabolical" is a strong term, I know, but I have to stick with it and I will soon explain why.

Ira gets all huffy because I tell him that Torquemada was a Jew and that anyway all Spaniards were descended from converted Jews

Anyhow, it was back to New York, and New York for me had its minuses and its pluses. On the minus side were the memories of the upper-Manhattan slums, the bleak days I had spent there after The Mount, and the loneliness when I escorted the Managing Editor part of the way on the trip to Europe I had rejected. On the plus side were American cheese sandwiches and the anticlyne of 57th street and the endless vistas along concrete canyons which had in some recondite manner the same appeal the lines of blue mountains stretching to unreachable El Dorados in The Republic held for me.

      I would be a liar if I didn't also admit that I preferred a year with four seasons to the tropical imposture of rain and humidity posing as winter and bone-bleaching sunshine and lip-cracking dryness as summer. I am at present living again in the Tropics and I still feel like Ovid when he was exiled to Dacia, worse, at least climatically, because the Rumanian weather is much more invigorating than the monotony and enervation of this infernal or more accurately purgatorial heat, which is one reason, not the least, why I find advocates of leeches and scorpions and dung beetles utter hypocrites. 

      This time around the problem of biculturalism did not come up for various reasons. You can say anything you want of New York City but the boonies it ain't, and if it was, in my opinion, vulgar and scruffy in places--my means of transportation to Kings was the old IRT--it exhibited these qualities in a grandiose scale, including the vast quantities of dogshit on the sidewalks. The few friends I made there were mostly Jews and New York Jews are anything but boring and provincial, although I must say that some Jews, like the witchy young girl who spit at me because I looked twice at her, which she didn't deserve, I didn't want to meet in a nightmare.

      Ira Friedman was about as prototypical of New York Jews as you could want. He was from Queens, where about half the population bore the same name as he did, and fanatically pro-Israel. When he got the religious bug he thought nothing of climbing twenty-three flights of stairs to visit me on a Sabbath. The elevator operator at The Masters, an Argentine Jew, was so impressed he told me: "You're friend is very religious". I thought Ira did it to show off, but I had to admit it was strenous way of doing it.

      He and I got along fine until certain misunderstandings arose between us, such as that he hated Spaniards--he had clear-cut affinities for Italians--and I told him that Torquemada was a Jew and that anyway most Spaniards were descended from convert Jews. He didn't much take to that and one time I thought I was being culturally brotherly by expressing a certain affinity for the way of life of a Talmudic scholar in The Pale (I swear it was not a put on) he shot back: "Oh yes, Carlos, and don't forget the kidnapping and sacrificing of Christian children", which had nothing to do with anything but made me understand there was a big distance between us and I hand't put it there.

      I am not and never was an anti-Semite, an expression which is meaningless to me, but then and there I realized that many Jews have a tendency to think that all non-Jews are naturally anti-Jew and that for them anti-Semitism consists in non-Jews talking about Jews, as if saying I didn't like the duck I had for dinner made me anti-duck. I have on some occasions in my life thought of conversion to Judaism, but I always came up against the mezuzas and phylacteries and dietary laws and what not. Besides, I have been told that circumcision in adults results in a lot of post-operative pain and that's something that has to be considered very seriously. I vaguely remember that my father had himself circumcised at some time in his life, but if that's true he probably did it because he was always very touchy about his penis, which he called the Firebird, and he might have believed that the prepuce was interfering with its flights. 

      Getting back to the people I met in New York, an Italian friend, appropriately enough named Mangiaragina, gave me a demijohn of home-brewed white wine and a fledgling poet once regaled me and my first wife with a copy of a magazine he edited called "Panic"--the name was designed in the "electric" style de Chirico for a time toyed with--and a loaf of bread his wife had baked. There were "Portoricans" all over the place who themselves unselfconsciously used that currently incorrect ethnic denomination, but they were mostly menials. This is not meant in derogation, for Dear Reader knows my affinity for female servants.

      Despite my ambiguous feelings, New York was so culturally and educationally generous it allowed me to make my own curriculum in which I combined what Kings had to offer with what I could collect on my own outside. In sum, New York made me, as London would later, and I can say that biculturalism was not a problem for me in America this time around because I did not feel bicultural in New York. I will add further that in point of fact I was through with biculturalism and however many lapses I might later have had from my fundamental non-belongingness in a general sense, my cultural loyalties were fixed forever and they had nothing to do with any specific nation or society. As to Kings, I could have been enroling in Red Hook Junior Preparatory Community College as far as I was concerned, which was continuing with the "research" I had started Lightning Bolt Night. In saying this I am not being unappreciative or deprecatory, for what is a college education worth if not what an individual can get from it? And if there was a person in the world determined to get something vitally personal out of studies it was me.

      This did not necessarily include doing brilliantly in courses I had little interest in, for after The Mount I was not about to fall twice for the pieties about being a good student for its own sake. There was no way in the world that any one could convince me that Phi Beta Kappa was anything but a triplet of Greek letters meaning exactly nothing, least of all the Managing Editor, who didn't give a damn what I did or did not believe, and who possibly might not have heard of them. I had been hankering for a profession and what I was being offered was college, which I suspected was in itself a cul de sac. In time I would discover that my low estimate of the professional and academic value of a Bachelor of Arts degree had been overoptimistic. Presently, I will try to demonstrate that my prejudices about Kings were partially justified, but first I would like to explain why, even with the greatest good will and the most open of minds, I would have been unable not to entertain some bad feelings about the whole New York experience, and that was on account of the trap the Managing  Editor and his wife had sprung on me.

The Moaning, or how death by a thousand cuts can seem like a rub down with Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday to You" in your ear

I was not going to be boarding in Kings but living in a hotel on Central Park West, in a large suite (sitting room, kitchenette, and two bedrooms), with my mother for a suite-mate!

      At first the arrangement was surprising but not something I could imagine not being able to put up with or even not finding comfortable. What the heck, I figured, I myself don't know what foolishness I might be capable of. After all, I had been expelled from The Mount for an escapade worthy of a mental incompetent. The Walden was a first-rate if unpretentious place. The sitting room of our suite occupied a corner of the squarish unremarkable not to say ugly two-tone brick building in something like a sixth floor and had an OK view over the park. Two blocks south was the American Museum of Natural History and across the park in a straight line was the Metropolitan (and the Frick collection not too far from there). Right next to the hotel, the Independent, from possibly the smallest and loneliest subway station in New York, took me to Columbus Circle and from there I could transfer to the IRT and ride in a local or an express (get off at 96th) to 116th and Broadway. What else could I want?

The Taxiarch lived at The Apthorp, a grand old building with a carriage-court and apartments that were the size of small mansions. He was only a few blocks away and I still remember his phone number (Endicott 25182), the only one I remember of the hundreds I must have used or called frequently in my life. He belonged to the New York Athletic Club, which did not have Jewish members! The NYAC restaurant used to make the greatest roast beef in the world. I know it because I tried to find its match in London and found only unsatisfactory approximations. It was rare and soft and juicy and the cuts always had the perfect amount of white, buttery fat. He also took me to The Red Coach Grill, where the steaks and the Idaho potatoes were so tasty I never understood why the place closed. I accompanied him to all the bars of all the hotels that fronted Central Park in the angle made by 59th street and Fifth Avenue up to about where The Pierre is, excluding The Plaza, where for some reason he never went. But this is just a sample to show that I had no call to complain about my material circumstances.

Where the money was coming from, as I had not chosen my residence, or anything else, I couldn't have cared less. All I knew was that the Managing Editor was finally keeping up with the Taxiarch and I accepted his munificence as a matter of course never suspecting that my mother considered it the equal of God's bounty, something to be grateful for without questioning his motives, or so she said she believed, although she did know them. Both in their own ways were very complex personalities, my mother so subtly that in my mind next to her Einstein's cosmological constant and the development of Big Bang theory are what kindergarten music lessons would be to Mozart.

      There was in this situation the slightly discomfiting detail that every god-damn night after my mother went to bed in her room, with the door deliberately ajar, and I was in my own room studying or reading, she would do her prayers accompanied by continuous loud Moaning punctuated at regular intervals by the same ejaculation in the sense that she wanted to die. It was a damn lie, but one of those that after innumerable repetitions still seemed like a lie yet created a hypnotically depressing effect, almost like the condition she appeared to yearn for, except that what she was saying was only a half-lie: she didn't want to die but I certainly did! And it was no use if I shut my room door or raised the volume of the television set because all this achieved was that she would moan louder or prolong the session until long after Steve Allen and Skitch Henderson had gone home and were asleep.

      I could have asked for a transfer from that hellish suite to anywhere else, but what sort of person would I have been to abandon my own mother when she seemed to be always on the verge of extinction? I should have known better but, as I said, I had the weakness of pity and if I showered it on total strangers, how could I deny it to my own mother who kept clamoring for it?

      I know that she did not want to die, and I must say for her that when she was dying, many years after the time in New York I am talking about, she did put up a brave front and it was only the despicably mercenary quacks who attended her who softened her will and made her cry as she was going under anesthesia that above all else she did not want to die. She could contemplate death as a fate she would, at a distance, be willing to undergo as a token of love (she was as I said complex), but as to in-your-face dying she wanted to die as much as Pushkin wanted to eat dry industrial dog chow or I wanted to hear her ghastly nocturnal Moaning compared to which death by a thousand cuts was a rub down with Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday to You" in your ear. Besides, in thinking back on these events, I am certain I could have done nothing about my situation, because ultimately it was part of the punishment the Managing Editor was inflicting on me for my rebelliousness and in particular as a consequence of the unforgiveably dumb way I had acted at The Mount which had put me entirely at the command of my principal enemy.

The Letter and how Bomber Harris, fire chief and town planner in Hamburg and Dresden, had nothing on my mother

My mother was not dumb. At least she wrote with flawless grammar and expressive

power, which brings us to why she had it in for me during the three years we lived together in Manhattan, until I could stand it no longer and fanned an ember of love into a passion that would dare challenge the Magister and Managing Editor to do his worse.

      Anybody who has ever had to write as an obligation knows about dawdling and fidling and pulling drawers to make sure the eraser has not turned into a cockroach or on the offchance the drawer will fall out and you'll have to stop and place it back on its runners, and so on, and to my surpise one night I did find something to distract me. The letter was in the center drawer of the desk in the sitting room on which I placed the portable Royal typewriter I used in my college work. It had obviously been placed there in such a way that it was meant to be found but that if it was it could be the cause of an expression such as: "How did you find that?", but only after it was known that the letter had been read and that you would not be able to comply with the request of handing it back implicitly unread.

      Despite the transparent purpose of the ploy, it took another night of particularly heavy Moaning until it finally dawned on me, literally at dawn, why it was that I was where I was undergoing the punishment I was. And even then I still accepted my fate, which makes me think that my greatest show of loyalty to my mother was not the the time I did not run away when she acted like a moron at the airline counter, but taking, like Rocco the Neo-realist Milanese boxer invented by Visconti or like the Germans refusing to surrender after Bomber Harris became town planner in Hamburg and Dresden, what she dished out on a nightly basis to me in New York.

      The letter was an answer to a communication--I don't know whether it was by letter or by other means--from the Managing Editor, but it told the entire story with such economy of means I often genuinely wonder whether between my mother and her fleshly god she was not the more talented of the two, which means that, when in an optimistically delirious mood I am convinced I am a genius far above mortal recompense and I thank whatever genes may be for my inherited gifts, it is her and not my father, the obviously succesful role model, that I should thank. My deep-down belief is that I don't have to thank any one for anything, except perhaps God if something good happens to me, and this is probably just a superstitious relict from my last and final and greatest bout of faith when I had to stop dipping and start embracing life to the full. This by the way is another hint on the purpose of these confessions and I mention it because in this Sargasso Sea of recall it is necessary to have some indications in order to distinguish ships laden with treasures from those which only carry ballast.

      My father had not been made for marriage. He believed that great men like Mussolini and himself had the right to have mistresses. Marriage was a concession of the male of the species. This attitude was further nurtured by his entry into the Imperial Ranks and it became stronger in proportion to his success, which culminated in his years as Managing Editor and Apocrisiary. It seems that shortly before I was accepted at Kings he had a paramour about which he was serious enough to ask my mother for a divorce. In my opinion she should have worked out a settlement, but she wasn't the type, nor did she have the education, and instead recurred to her natural cunning and her talent and her addiction to self-pity and wrote a humdinger of a letter which was the one I found in the desk at The Walden.

      After acknowledging the Managing Editor's infatuation as the right of her Lord and Master--knowing what I have witnessed, and if it weren't for her unctuousness and the martyr's face she loved to assume, I could almost believe she was being ironical--she wrote that she was putting her future and mine in his hands, as if she were a Prophet bowing to Jehovah's express verbal commands. She added that she was willing to accept any terms he cared to impose and she made an obiter dictum, more like a throwaway line, concerning my derelictions and the need to "care" for me, as if I still needed potty-training. What she was offering and I did not at first understand was that to avoid divorce she would be willing to accept the role of relegated number-one wife and have me forever as a companion in lieu of the Managing Editor's presence. And these pleas and hints and proposals were stated in a dead-pan, absolutely dry style in which not one word or reference was de trop. Seneca in comparison was bawling when he entered his tub before he cut his veins. Christians in the Coloseum next to her might have been shouting: "Hey, people, we didn't really mean it about Diocletian being a Pagan incompetent deadhead!", just before the guards let the lions out of their pen.

      The letter--about three pages long, her one literary masterpiece, also in her finest calligraphy, another ability she had from the priest--amounted to a kind of "marriage arrangement" involving me, transacted behind my back and without my consent. In thinking back later, I suspected the letter might have been the written confirmation of a tacit agreement reached between the parties long before, perhaps on the eve of my deportation to the slums of Upper Manhattan. No wonder three years after I "found" it give or take a month I would do my own contracting in my own way without consulting the signatories of the previous contratto matrimoniale. But in the mean time I was caught in a vise I could not wriggle out of because the Moaning--her way of saying: "Look what I am putting up with for you"--sounded sincere and try as I might I could not reconcile it with cynicism.

      The obvious contradiction involved in moaning over a situation you yourself chose in order to avoid a more mournful one can be explained through a long and complicated sorites, which is in the text and any one who wants to can work out. I doubt many will want to and this is why I try to keep things light and why another important point of these lengthy confessions is to illustrate one of the basic arguments of my fully-developed philosophy, which is that we are logical, every man jack of us, and we cannot avoid being logical; but to find out how we are logical we have to get a good grasp on the premises and accept the inevitable proposition that our cognitive powers occur and function in the subconscious (these being my own trouvailles they have nothing to do with properly Freudian bilge).

      I wanted to die even less than my mother did. Death was so far from my calculations that I could moan inside my brain in unison with her and I could actually go to sleep, as she did, with the thought of Death the Comforter in my mind. But I went a few steps further--advantages of an education, I suppose, where hers, formally speaking, had been almost non-existent--because I developed a secret obsession with death that coloured so many aspects of my life I could almost describe myself as a walking, thinking catafalque, next to whom or which Charles Addams had the imagination of a beetle.

Even on an election year, the inevitability of death sure as hell beat the inevitability of taxes

My first literary composition reflected this obsession (and the decrepit IRT): "Lady in black from a cemetery/riding the subway in a morning train./I thought I would kiss her but my lips repugned/lest bits of her flesh stick to my face." As I have never had pretensions to being a poet, I am not attributing anything other than evidentiary value to this text, but please observe the archaic use of "to repugn" and the incongruity of a symbol of death in a morning rush hour crowd in New York's favorite means of transportation for drop-outs, at a time when school tests showed most third-grade students there thought a spelling bee was something you had to brush away when you ventured to New Jersey or Long Island. As I have heard, the situation has not improved much since, which, from a benign point of view, is a distorted reflection of the city's cosmopolitanism.

      Also from that bit of doggerel, you can infer that my incipient necrophilia was oriented towards carrion. As part of my efforts to ward off neurosis, after an Argentine Freudian quack tried and failed, I devised "The Carrion Rites of Wordly Disenchantment" which consisted in the slow recitation of this phrase or something like it accompanied by the slight or the symbolic pinching of my forearms depending on whether I was in a state of undress or of dress, respectively. This was a reference to the corruptibility of all flesh implying I had nothing to worry about. It was also a lugubrious version of the profound philosophy expressed in the immortal queries: "What? Me worry?"

      Death or rather the thought of death shaded my aesthetic judgement in many ways, but in none more influential than in my adoration for Claude Debussy. Even though during those years my musical horizons expanded immeasurably, I can say that the music I most listened to was Debussy's complete piano works, in a recording by the Frenchman Casadesus, although I did have the German Gieseking in superior interpretations of the "Bergamasque Suite" and "The Children's Corner". The only rival to Debussy in my high esteem was Sibelius's Symphony Number Two. Number One was so obviously a forerunner of Number Two I only listened to it to sharpen my appetite for Number Two, to which incidentally a child might retort that he or she can do both at the same time. This predilection corresponded to an entirely different mood, one having to do with optimism and hope related to Lightning Bolt Night back in The Republic.

      Even though I knew that Debussy's life had a rather humdrum mundanity--good parent, ladies' man, gregarious to a fault, passionate patriot--his music to me was about "death", so much so that I tried to elaborate an aesthetics based on it which would be applicable to other art forms. But it wasn't about "death" as in dying, which is another proposition altogether. It was "death" as in Claude Lorrain ("Et in Arcadia ego"), in Watteau's "The Embarkation for Cythera", or in Hubert Robert and his paintings of otherwordly Italian ruins (and little bunches of tiny costumed peasants as if to show that there were people around somewhere). I also came across it in Dutch masters, especially Vermeer and Hoogh, and it was lurking in representations of skies as in El Greco's "View of Toledo", a paradigm of the effect, and in the backgrounds of early Italian Renaissance masters, particularly if, as was usually the case, they included landscapes of all kinds (farmlands, mountains, cities). Brueghel The Elder, a painter of some large canvasses in which the background is, as it were, part of the foreground, was overabundant in what he had to offer me. The impressionists, especially Monet and Pissarro, rivalled the Dutch in evoking the same highly personal reactions, and this was to be the crucial clue to what I was after, because after all, apart from these painters all being dead, their works had nothing to do with death. 

      In literature I felt similar sensations in some poems or even lines of poems--in Villon and Yeats, to cite two cases--and in descriptive prose passages, which in some Spanish writers such as Azorin or Jimenez constitute their forte, but which were not supposed to be of any particular importance in D.H.Lawrence, although they were how I managed to get through some of his more turgid writing. The author who came closest to this aesthetics of death was Proust and he of course takes me back to other French composers: Chausson (Proust's Vinteuil), D'Indy, Fauré, and even Chabrier (whose lightness of touch is tinged with the same sadness that imbues the phrase "les neiges d'antan"). Occasionally in music there were direct references to this mood, as in Turina's "Oración del Torero" and particularly in Ravel's "Pavanne pour une enfante défunte".

      These encounters--and I have mentioned but a tiny few--were powerful stimulants to my sensibility. Unfortunately, my desire to put these experiences into a coherent theoretical context came to nought for various reasons. Whenever I thought that sooner or later I would have to square the idea of death and the experience of art, I became discouraged because art can be about death and a great deal of art is about death and mortality--which as any run-of-the-mill American congressman even on an election year will agree beat taxes in their inevitability--but it is not necessarily always about death and dying. 

      Another problem was the extreme subjectivity of this aesthetics of death which could lead, say, to excessive admiration for Alma-Tadema and his evocations of ancient Roman life, complete to the faint staining of marble by flowing water or decaying vegetation, as in tombstones. Alma-Tadema was a Dutch-British master draughtsman, in some respects a Victorian Norman Rockwell, but hardly a crucial figure in the history of art. In the worst of cases, aesthetic subjectivism could make by-the-numbers paintings seem poetical depending on the subject. I had what I considered moving aesthetic experiences by walking on Sundays the totally deserted streets of the financial district in Lower Manhattan, an enjoyment which I can safely say few if any shared with me and which anyway today is as conceivable as an ant having its own private quarters in an ant-hill.

In a post-coital meditative mood, I discover the difference between aesthetics and sensuality

There was one area of experience in which artistic subjectivism seemed to be irrecusably authentic, hence an obstacle to renouncing my aesthetics of death, and that had to do with the appreciation of nature. The one attraction of the Tropics I stood by with the tenacity of a mastiff was the way the sun set in an orgiastic display of colours with sky and clouds as an awesome primed canvass. This spectacle of light was so intense that the atmosphere itself seemed to take on an almost palpable golden hue, as if one were living in a paint pot. Now, this, I argued, was beauty in its essence, an undeniable aesthetic experience, but so totally subjective that it was incommunicable, not only because it beggared description but because I knew most people were unaffected by it. And however much nature might beguile me, I had to admit its garish colours and its happenstance formations were hardly art.

      The problem dogged me until the windy afternoon, near sunset, with a magnificently lighted line of summits receding into distant hazes and an agitated sea in the near distance--and myself even closer in a post-coital meditative mood--I realized there was a difference between aesthetics and sensuality and though the latter could be a part of the aesthetic experience it was not in itself the definition of art, as in general it was a mistake to confuse what our specific selves can discover in art, such as mortality or the brevity of life, with what art is "essentially" about. I realize these statements leave a lot of issues in a "distant haze", maybe even drowning in an "agitated sea", but still another thing these memoirs are not is a treatise on aesthetics. These qualifications I keep making would seem to be whittling this work down to nothing only if the point is not coming through that I am writing it after I had grappled sufficiently with the concept of neurosis and it is not becoming clear that, if it means anything at all, "neurosis" must refer as much to the social and historical events and processes of the times I have lived as to my own private concerns.

      After my discovery of the distinction between aesthetics and sensuality, one important question remained to be answered and that was why I had associated my death-based aesthetics with Vermeer and Hoogt and Monet and Pissarro. The impressionists found beauty in the ordinariness of life--strictly speaking, it had been done before by the Dutch and Flemish masters and Chardin and many others, but the impressionists placed it at the center of art appreciation--and that was close to what my own life was about, which was the discovery and exploration of my own intimacy. Now, this sounds somewhat masturbatory, but it was nothing of the sort. It was on a different level of existence, it had constancy and transcendent if vague objectives, and especially it did not leave in my hands the messy muck that was what I got from beating off. My aesthetics were not about death but about nostalgia for a condition in which I could devote myself to lofty, leisurely contemplation without the burden of Life-With-Mother (let's call it that) or the Managing Editor's interferences in my life, like having a quack stick his finger up my ass in search of my undescended testicle or getting the Taxiarch, whose hypochondria about his prostrate was the link to the quack, to set me up with prostitutes.

      Proust writing endlessly in his room and throwing sumptuous parties he never attended has always been very much of an ideal. Debussy's music, which got me started me on this theme in the first place, was numinous. I still don't know how to explain its appeal for me. I don't listen to it much any more and I doubt that if I did I could recapture what I felt then. Perhaps it was simply the harmonies, which were new to me. I could get saccharine about here, so I will just say that in listening to Debussy I felt as if I were inside a Vermeer interior (and vice versa), or like a peasant stuck in a Hubert Robert fantasy landscape, forever, which sooner or later might have produced in me the same panicky reaction a fly experiences when it realizes it wasn't a honey paradise it had landed on but a prairie of unsavoury, camouflaged glue.

      I was longing so much for space of my own, I mistook death for the ultimate state of escape from constraints. There was death and the idea of death and I wasn't too clear on this distinction. The obsession with death was, like my reaction to my mother's hotel stories, a conditioning through which, conceivably, I might have been trying to discover what it was about dying that so filled her with yearning, until, after about twenty visits to Père Lachaise with its monuments and its photo-medallioned columbaria, I began to get a creepy, cadaverous feeling myself and I gave up my obsession for good and all.

      Lest anybody feel tempted to make too much of these events, I would like to set down that they transpired before George Romero invented walking rotting corpses, after which the American film industry has documented decomposition with such realism and from so many angles that what remains is for multicinemas to retail edible imitations of roasted body parts together with facsimiles of buzzing flies and artificial odors, which couldn't be much worse anyway than a heaping dish of andouillettes. The worst that could be said of me in comparison with this popular explosion of morbidity is that I was ahead of the times, so that when the theme of rot became fashionable I had as much interest in it as a butcher would have in a documentary about slaughterhouses. But possibly my experience is not so different from that of the public at large, for, just as rot movies are strictly for fun and laughter, so my interest in real death was so spurious that now when I feel the real thing breathing down my neck and it is almost as if I could ask it to sit down for a chat or a game of chess, I wouldn't give it the time of day, not to mention the date and year.

Not content with expelling them from Paradise, Gabriel insists on calling Adam and Eve ungrateful, low-born sleazes

The gist of my enforced, unwanted Life-With-Mother was my growing disassociation from the "real" world, which made me feel much affinity for Kafka's dung beetle or his even more futile mole. The latter symbolized for me the further retreat of my libido into the burrow it had begun digging back in my whoring days in The Republic. But the dung beetle had only to contend with an apple embedded in its carapace, and old K. himself in The Castle was hounded by a pair of gymnastic clowns performing for him as if he were a theatrical agent and not by a sex-obsessed father shouting admonitions in public about the perils of masturbation, as if the Archangel Gabriel not only had expelled Adam and Eve from Paradise but had kept shouting at them from heaven what a pair of ungrateful, low-born sleazes they were.

      I would have been perfectly content if I had been left to my own unrealistic romantic devices without the imposition of the sexual imperatives the Taxiarch was charged with doing. Why he accepted the role of procurer is a mystery that now lies hidden in the irrecoverable secret of the enigmatic relations between the two brothers. Russia, that so perplexed Churchill, is in comparison wrapped in cellophane, which is proof in my system that the minor events of ordinary life are vastly more complex that the great processes of history, another reason why I felt that my own concerns about existence were as important as, or at least as similar to, anything that was happening in the world at large. I have never had cause to regret this attitude, much less after I chucked everything to devote my time to philosophy and understood how Descartes had set it on its modern dualistic course by making the irrefutable claim that he was thinking and how Kant's vague musings about cosmology and international relations were but addenda to his proposition (in concrete illustrative terms) that one litterbug is just a slob but a lot of them would have spoiled his clockwork afternoon constitutionals in Königsberg, although in the end he could not show cause why any slob should not be a slob if he wants to.

      The thing is that the Taxiarch introduced me around to some of his female acquaintances, which was another poser as it seemed to belie his regrets about whoring and having been smitten by the clap so many times it had made him sterile, and was in addition the presumed cause of his prostrate pains, an affliction even his quack proctologist told him was imaginary. After I became an amateur Freudian, I naturally thought it had to do with guilt, but that was none of my concern, especially when through him I met Nilda, a young Portorican with horrible diction but a luscious body to which I became addicted.

      I must explain that I was not being constrained by the Taxiarch to do anything and what I did was tag along when he invited me out, on which occasions, among other happenings, I was present at a party with some moonlighting primary school teachers and at The Pierre bar a spiffy-looking pimp told me his elegant, curvaceous "sister" was looking to make some extra money for a down payment on a condominium. I cased the situation and decided I could not afford to make a down payment on her.

      Nilda had no overhead expenses like drinks at The Pierre--she lived in a modest but not uncomfortable apartment--and her rates were well within my occasional means, which were some kind of allowance, sufficient in any event for regular (not frequent) visits to her place, on one of which I ventured there on the spur of the moment (read empty wallet) and she gave it to me anyway but with a brief and emphatic lesson on how money does not grow on trees. Nilda was very attractive--I seem to remember that she had a resemblance to Shirley McLaine--and I had the occasional thought that I might be in love with her, but this was just a thought and without intending it she put a damper on my incipient romantic fancies when she recounted, as if telling me what she had for breakfast, how she had given a cut-rate to five clients who went to see her for servicing at the same time.

      Even while in New York I became distanced from Nilda and it was not until many years later that I called her on a visit to that city more out of curiosity than of prurience. She had the same phone number and she offered to visit me at my hotel. It wasn't a good idea. Lovely Nilda still retained some remnants of her former charms from the breast or maybe the neck up, but her thigs were unrecognizable and unappealing, so massive and covered with hair I had trouble getting it up and true to type she kept telling me to get on with it. It was a depressing experience and it reminded me of the Freudian quack I had formerly visited. As I was also feeling mellow and prosperous, I called him also and he also offered to visit me. He barely remembered me and after I consulted him on one thing or another (actually unnecessary) he told me he was trying to get into import-export--and not succeeding from his scruffy looks--and charged me about the same as Nilda had, which just goes to show something.

      My disassociative tendencies during my years at Kings were quite relative and it could even be said that I had more social life in New York than in The Republic. There was for one thing that Life-With-Mother was not necessarily always a pain in the neck. Apart from the hellish Moaning she was solicitous enough and I remember in particular the Saturday mornings breakfast ritual during which she would invariably prepare French toast for me and I would invariably play a recording Mozart's Trio Divertimento and the two were as inseparable as Proust's madeleine and the visits to his grandmother.

I tell Aryaca to put a chastity belt on his wife and he does a hair-sprouting Lon Chaney Jr routine

My mother was also the bridge to other expats in New York, who, as she never made American friends, were the only social life she had, still another cause for not abandoning her no matter how much she made my nights unbearable and unwittingly encouraged my obsession with death and increased the gap in my life between romance and sex. I say expats but they were mostly transients and her connection to them was through the Taxiarch and his wife.

      The real expats I met were political exiles of means whom the Taxiarch frequented. There was a tall, cadaverous shyster named Aryaca--he was the organizer of the orgy with the schoolmarms--who later tried to bilk the Apocrisiary and on whom I wreaked a diabolical revenge. I have used the term "diabolical" in reference to Life-With-Mother and I will let it stand if only because of my resentment, but, as I admitted before, no harm was intended, whereas what I did to Aryaca was premeditated even if the coup de grâce came in an unforeseen manner and all I did was let my subconscious, under the momentary disinhibition of liquor, do the talking.

      Aryaca had married an attractive German countess, much younger than he was, about whom a man he had sent to jail made accusations of infidelity which he managed to circulate widely. It might have been, for all I knew, a real-life enactment of "la calumnia è un venticello", but Aryaca had so many enemies willing to believe this gossip that he, who had the frame of a Gigantopithecus and the frown of a Neanderthal, started feeling insecure and touchy. This was after his unscrupulous and underhand maneuver against my father, which had been stopped at the very last moment, and by then, through another shyster I knew, I had become friendly with him as if letting bygones be bygones.

      One night I saw him in a bar and we got to talking and suddenly I swear I could not believe I was telling him to be more careful about his wife's whereabouts. His reaction was like Lon Chaney Jr. doing his hair-sprouting stunt while gripping a heavy tumbler as if he wanted to make it his first victim on that night's prowl. I backed away and we never patched things up. I never regretted what I did. Aryaca was a dishonest, violent, and ruthless SOB, as was his cousin, another expat who later became a big poo-bah in The Republic and whom I saw in Cuba being strung along by Castro's doctors with the offer of restoring his sight until they finally came clean and said they were lying. He shrank into himself like Dorian Grey without his portrait and died a month later.

      Seeing these and other expats, I felt thankful to be far from The Republic and I did not give a thought to the machinations of the Managing Editor. These had to be in a distant future (I still believed in such a thing) and there were as usual many good moments, some even involving the Taxiarch, whom I did not hate that much any more. On Sundays he made me part of a ritual of his own which was to order a watery unappetizing soup, supposedly made from spinach, in an Italian restaurant called "Patsy's" run by a sallow, spindly, unsmiling man he always called "captain". I never liked this "captain" or his place, but I did enjoy having chicken timballes with the Taxiarch in the arts atrium at the Metropolitan. And during Christmas, which was always white in those days in New York, I experienced such utter content listening to the Brandenburg concerti from the record player in the stately salon of his mansion-like apartment that on the many occasions I have passed The Apthorp since I always think back and wish that time had stopped forever then. But the Taxiarch is dead--not, incidentally, from any prostrate-related disease--and so is his wife and his son is at peace with God in a monastery, in some ways as remote from New York as the Potala, and I think I am beating about the bush and it is time I began dealing with more substantial issues, like how it was I became aware of my neurosis.

      I will say of Kings that the total experience and its results were much better than the individual parts, which should surprise no one considering such things as that humanity in the aggregate (not in mobs) is more appealing than on average each human being is, or that appearances can be deceiving, like the handsome, respectable-looking pimp at The Pierre bar, so brilliant of all the barflies there he chose the only one that wasn't going to make his night, although I was not a bad-looking fellow myself and it could have been his protegé who suggested that he approach me instead of the decidedly older clientele.

      In the basic courses at Columbia, again as on a general-population average basis, your basic bore was more common than the interesting individuals, and this too is understandable because a teaching position at Kings was a coveted prize but since you didn't have to be a genius to get one, dyed-in-the-wool mediocrities were apt to think they had more on the ball than was the case. When these under-achievers were on a roll in class with their blood-brothers among the students it was a spectacle to behold. On one occasion that involved me, an instructor mentioned Swedenborg--as he knew nothing about him whatever, for reasons lost in the mists of time--and turned to us and asked: "Where was he born anyway?", and I, who for another forgotten reason knew this, answered: "Sweden", whereupon my classmate Dumbo, who was obviously getting his Scandinavian theologians confused, said: "Denmark", and the Mr. Super-Dumbo instructor added: "Yeah, it does seem kind of funny that Swedenborg should be from Sweden". I said nothing.

      One time in London with some LSE Latinamericanists--of all "ists" in the universe, you'll find among these the greatest proportion of sods (with highly honourable non-sods)--and I was trying to recall the name of Palmira, a large city near Cali, in Colombia, but I could not and neither could these big experts around me who simply wrote the place off and its currently maybe half a million inhabitants, and fool me, who knew better, conceded the point.

      It also happens that I sometimes say too much and I regret it a lot. Fortunately I am just a step away from the condition where I can say or not say anything and not care either way (which probably means I will be dead). I am not there yet but I might be by the end of these confessions.

A hotdog vendor gives me expert academic advice I adamantly refuse to follow

I had another brush with such academic luminaries in wordly, cosmopolitan New York,

when, armed with my University of London PhD and my published dissertation, I visited a drowsy-looking professor at Gotham College--I met him through a dippy Panamanian who had the harebrained notion she could actually start a romance with a man who only needed provisional lodgings--and he summoned a colleague next door to his, who looked as if he had just left his hotdog stand, and the two puzzled over my enquiries about teaching and finally suggested that I apply at the "Afro-American Academic Center" or something in that general line. Considering that my book covered in fine, witty, and agile prose the entire history of Western ideas on economic development and underdevelopment, with lateral but thorough explorations of themes such as environmental determinism and social Darwinism, most of which only marginally concerned Afro-American studies (which I would have been proud to excel in under other circumstances), the suggestion caught me off base and it was only after I told them what they could do with it that I thought slowly and calmly and understood that eight years of Ronald Reagan, during which the Three Stooges had become national role-models (admittedly for men), had not happened in a vacuum.

      Back again in my Kings years, I met a fellow named Bill Preppy, although between the two of us I was much more sought out that seeking. He was short, stoutish, and bespectacled, and he talked a lot and said his career plans were in politics. They might indeed have been but not in the big time, because I remember reading a news brief somewhere to the effect that Dubya, or Dole, had removed his entire campaign command in Walla-walla as too power-hungry. The dispatch mentioned a "William Preppy" and Walla-walla was where my friend came from. Be that as it may, Bill did have political talent. He was a good public speaker and he knew what could awake interest in an audience, if not actually rile it, a possible reason he was fired, if it was Dole, or Dubya, and it was him that got fired.

      This was about the height of the Cold War, which were also the USSR's salad days, although they weren't that salad, because Khrushchev had denounced Stalin but he hadn't done much to dismantle the system Stalin had put in place and in particular he was in no position to loosen Moscow's grip on the theoretically informal Soviet Empire, a patently schizoid policy. The personality cult had been jerked and twisted, so there were too many rivals around for pudgy, loutish Khrushchev--all in all, though, an epochal historical figure, who faced tougher opposition than hard-drinking, comedic McCarthy ever was for Eisenhower--to be able to give orders at his unhindered discretion, and he surely had to do a lot of consultation before doing anything daring.

      Since Gorbachev was in a comparable political situation thirty years or so later, I have always believed that he did not launch glastnost and perestroika without having a strong silent consensus behind him, including especially the Military, although as events have shown the schizoid tendencies in the former USSR have apparently not abated, which might mean our current unipolar world retains some of the characteristics of the insane asylum the former bipolar world often seemed. Nevertheless, Khrushchev did take the one initiative that almost brought on the Nuclear Apocalypse when he acceded to arm Cuba with missiles.

      In retrospect, the missiles-crisis days, even immediately after they were over, have the texture of an ordinary, humdrum week, but they were anything but that, and I remember as if it had been yesterday that when Kennedy sent warships to intercept the Soviet cargo vessels and their escorts I was so certain that we were in for it--I don't exactly know for what but I knew it wasn't going to be pleasant--that in the evening I began drinking at a party and didn't stop until the following day on a beach I saw the sun rise over the watery horizon and realized my hangover was the worst that would befall me that day. After the Russians turned back, things were back to Cold War normality and I erased the previous day's shock and fear from my mind.

      My memory of those events was relegated to somewhere in my subconscious and it did not come back in full force until I was living in Cuba and on the 30th anniversary of the crisis Castro orchestrated an international symposium to commemorate the occasion, attended by American big shots like MacNamara, in which he made as if he was the leader of a great power, and not the run-down country with a joke economy that Cuba was, and offered his own Khrushchev-bashing version of history, a decidedly one-sided view for the missiles deal was like pushing coming to shove and it is more likely that Castro was the instigator. Whatever it was that finally undid Khrushchev, the Cuba debacle had to be an important influence, because it represented the greatest humiliation administered to Soviet power until then, especially coming after the Hungarian uprising had been suppressed and Russian rockets had downed the U2 spy plane. 

      All of this is intended to explain how anybody who at Kings in my time set up a soap-box and had the gall to argue for any kind of rapprochment with communists of whatever stripe was going to gather about him a crowd of aggressive hecklers, which is exactly what Bill Preppy did with me at his side. Obviously, he did not say anything in favour of communism, but he did something which at that moment in history sounded more radical, which was to argue that since the USSR and China had had a falling out--again Khruschev's doing, with the not inconsiderable assistance of Mao Tse-tung (whose insane cultural revolution was still only a glint in his eyes)--it made sense for the United States to establish relations with Beijing. The logic was rigorous, though hardly persuasive to the handful of Russian emigrés who were listening and grousing incoherently about Vorkuta, and to this day I have to hand it to him, for he was years ahead of Nixon and Kissinger, though possibly he might have lifted his stance from some article or book he read.

In sum, Bill was sharp and I felt comfortable with him until the night we were dining in a mid-town Brazilian restaurant and when I said something that might have implied that we were basically on the same cultural wavelength, he looked at me as if I had then and there asked him to let me screw his sister (whom I had met and didn't particularly like), and stated flatly: "But, Carlos, you are not white". This flabbergasted me because whatever it was we were talking about I know I was not claiming to be a snowman. Any way, Preppy's reaction wasn't earth-shattering but it did make me feel as if I was being used as his flunky in case he failed to gather an audience, and from that night I resolved never again to help him set up his soap-box even if he had told me he was going to do sommersaults in a short skirt, an act for which he certainly wouldn't have lacked a crowd (some no doubt holding a straightjacket).

Mr Heevie Jeevies is much taken with me, but I disappoint him with my indifference to the elevation of St Lukes

Getting back to the dum-dums I met at Kings, there was the instructor who accosted me aggressively once because I asked to transfer from his course on something or other--I only did it because it was being taught in a laboratory, where smoking was not allowed, which then could be done, and I usually did, in most classrooms--and who to my consternation happened also to be the teacher in a class on logic I had chosen mainly to fulfill degree requirements. He saw me and smirked and I thought my goose was cooked. As in The Mount when I asked for transfer from a dorm, I figured that I could not make another transfer request without arousing attention I did not want, so I just sat there and waited for whatever was going to happen, but all that did was a rehash of the old plane geometry exercises with lots of letters and symbols thrown in and half the time the instructor making Jewish jokes that had his mainly Jewish students rolling on the floor and which I celebrated with a wan smile so as not to antagonize Mr. Jewish Jokeman any more than I already had.

      At Kings I was not interested in being praised by instructors--although my average after four years, including an F for dropping out of a math course, was a respectable B--but in carrying on with my own program, which may be why I majored, of all things, in English literature, as if I wanted to prove my suspicions about the professional uselessness of a college degree. I mean, my chances of eventually getting work as a professor of English--my rendition of the introductory verses to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was for my teacher, as Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan fame put it, "a source of innocent merriment"--had to be on a par with the pretensions of a Nicaraguan I met in Oxford who was writing a thesis on Luncheonette, a minor Gladstonian liberal whose name doesn't even figure in The Columbia Encyclopedia and which I remember only because his granddaughter was a psychiatric counselor at the LSE whom I consulted because I wanted to get over my bad feelings about my separation from my "fifth wife" and especially because her services were free. To round out this bit of oddity she listened to my tirades in silence and when I had finished she started nodding (she wasn't asleep) until I got tired of waiting and left.

      In art education, my instructor was a lanky, owlish man, who once said the down view from the Tower of Pisa gave him the heevie-jeevies (and the class came close to sniggering), not at all then a dashing artist-type, at most slightly Greenwich-Village. He first took a shine to me when he asked what the colonnades around St. Peter's plaza in Rome suggested and I said: "Arms". After that every other sentence he uttered ended by his looking at me and saying: "Right, Mr Carlos?" (which also had the class sniggering). Our romance ended when he gave me the assignment of writing up the elevation of St. Luke's, a hospital nearby as remarkable as the corner newstand, and I, who was then spending a good part of every week memorizing every detail of the Frick collection, said so.

      That was another C, but there weren't that many, and what depressed my average down in the end was the stunt I pulled in math by not paying attention and not showing up for the final, instead of dropping out when I still had time to avoid an F. Why I signed up for that course, apart again from the degree-requirement thing, I can only try to explain to Dear Reader. It wasn't that I couldn't hack it. I could if I concentrated and this has to mean that there were no ostensible reasons for not passing any basic math course. In time I became interested in every subject under the sky and I felt the lack of math when I wanted to go one step beyond even complex but non-technical expositions of science involving numbers, which excludes very little indeed. But numbers as such had nothing to do with the enigmas that had been accumulating in my memory since, maybe, my mother's Pavlovian experiments on me with hotels.

      In later studies I came across books about ethics and even history written almost entirely in logical formulas--the better ones were by Indians, who never cease to amaze me, even in as elementary a terrain as golf--but I knew they were bogus in so many ways I didn't even bother trying to understand them, just as I never bothered with Quine's logical treatises because I knew they could not be more accurate or reliable than his fully verbalized arguments, which were demanding but preposterous. As to logic itself, I came to believe in Wittgenstein's contention that it is tautological--like saying that symbol-manipulation is equivalent to playing with yourself--although I added the twist that logical axioms derive from the principle of identity, described by Leibniz as the indiscernibility of identicals, but more on this when the time comes.

      In the absence of this suspect belief in the reliability of math and well-formed formulas for solving problems such as why the IRT, to paraphrase my arts instructor, gave me the heevie-jeevies, numbers and their behaviour have to be attractive in themselves for any one to go to the bother of reading page after page of pure thought without even the hint of a conclusion in sight. Admittedly, conclusions themselves are suspect, but what I did not find in mathematics no matter how far I journeyed was even the shadow of an idea. Now, this is wrong too, because science is about ideas, as often as not as puzzling as the things that Horatio could not imagine--and Hamlet couldn't either, which makes him not only the paragon of indecisiveness but a braggart as well--but whether scientific thought precedes mathematical thinking is as difficult an issue as the chicken-or-egg paradox, and just as trivial. Even with the best of intentions when physicists try to explain the universe without recourse to the mathematical tools of their trade, they cannot avoid sounding patronizing and making with the: "Actually, it's a bit more complex than that", or: "This could get very technical", and so on. Science and math go together and you cannot have one without the other.

      It is impossible to imagine the universe compressed to something no bigger than my memory of some childhood incident--both of which, inconceivable though it may be, occurred in the same time-sequence--but you can represent it in infinitely large digits conforming to rule-governed equations, hence manageable and unarbitrary despite the apparent absurdity. Pure scientific thinking can sometimes seem like explorations into the absurd so outrageous that Sartre or Camus in comparison might have been Hansel and Gretel trying to solve the problem of how not to get lost in the forest. Conversely, it made the ridicule that analytical philosophers heaped on their existentialist colleagues seem like the kind of irresistible offer papal emissaries gave Galileo or the cold-shoulder Columbus got from the scholarly monks in the Spanish court. The point is that I have no excuse for not paying attention in the math course and failing to take the final. Perhaps if I had been able to take science and math seriously I would have put aside my personal concerns, but this would have been possible only in a thought-experiment in which my brain had been altered and my memory erased by an insane analytical philosopher of mind.

Prolonged post-Sputnik euphoria can be compared to spending a lifetime watching "I Love Lucy" reruns (and enjoying them)

Whatever solutions there might or might not have existed to my deficiencies on those subjects, I still had the problem of satisfying the degree requirement in science and I chose what promised to be cinch course, which was astronomy. By the third or fourth session I was starting to get the blahs again until something happened which brought me out of my fidgety indifference with a visible start. The race for space between the superpowers was on and in the United States one read daily about the awesome preparations for launching a satellite the size of a tennis ball, and then, like a red bolt out of the blue, the sneaky, untrustworthy Russians launched Sputnik, a spiky round object the size a big beach balloon.

      Now, this was a real shocker with myriad ripples in an instant and over the following decades, but the one nearest to me was that our astronomy professor dropped all talk of ecliptics and parallaxes and devoted the rest of the course to an exposition of Newtonian mechanics, with multiple asides about how he knew this and how he knew that; and my complete disinterest in the design and operation of telescopes was transformed into a lifelong interest in the mysteries of the universe, which before I had only experienced as wonderment at the way in the boondocks, far from city lights, starlight could make the earth glow. Physics, which before those events evoked only thoughts of filaments and Leyden jars--as world-shaking in my view as the hand-vibrators barbers used to stimulate clients' pectorals after a Bonzilla massage--took on the brightness of the Epiphany and, need I say more, I passed that course with a flaming A. But this was the least of it of course.

      Politically, it didn't turn me into a card-carrying communist--it did however feel like payback for the stupid cops in Pottyville--but it made me think again about my previous willingness to die for Hungarian freedom, for in the back of my mind there was the thought, which later on came to the forefront, especially during the Vietnam war, that if communists, notwithstanding Stalinism--at the time its horrors were not that uncontestable and one could enjoy Sholokhov, commisars and all, without a bad conscience--were capable of such a technological feat, why wouldn't they have been able to whip my backward, benighted country of Yahoos into a commonwealth of scientific and humanitarian Houyhnhnms? From a wider historical and less wishful personal perspective, the Russians' achievement would stand as so significant a landmark that later its toppling over and over by the United States, in combination with a mass of other historical evidence (not least the Vietnamese boat people), swayed me so completely away from communism I began feeling no compunction about saying out loud that Marx was an arrogant, misguided, servant-screwing pedant, which at least was something I had always believed but had never revealed as unworthy of a fully-accredited fellow-traveler.

      I can say in self-justification I was not the only one whom the Soviets dazzled with Sputnik. The CIA, which before had always underestimated the USSR's economic performance, began to overestimate it to such a degree that on the eve of Russia's descent to its present state of prostration some CIA analysts were saying that the size of its economy could very well be rivalling that of America. Sad to say, though these estimates have been laughed to scorn, many of my former countrymen, some in positions of great influence, are still stuck in post-Sputnik euphoria, which is like a lifetime watching reruns of "I Love Lucy", and enjoying them.

      The revelation of Newtonian physics--I knew about gravity obviously but understanding how it affected the launching of a rocket into an orbit certainly beat the puerile anecdote of a falling apple, which was nothing next to the way every body in The Republic brought down green mangoes--stood me in good stead until I began to read here and there about relativity, and that stumped me until seeing time running short I thought I could boil it down to three ideas: that since inertia and gravity were indistinguishable, energy, which caused inertia, and mass, which produced gravity, were the same; that forces determined the shape of the universe and it was not likely that there were straight lines (although I could assume they existed on Earth, except when I was drunk); and that since time and space were inextricable, time too could behave in counter-intuitive ways, like being faster or slower depending on the "perspective".

      That these conclusions were sufficient was highly to be doubted, but they could be squared with pop-scientific expositions and they had implications which could be worked out without having to become a mathematician, such as Einstein's own explanation that relativity could be compared to having to spend time in jail or in the company of a doll like Kim Basssinger, although I am not sure in which of the two cases it flies or crawls for all I can say for sure is that it is relentless and inconsiderate. My one summary deduction was that if the universe could be expressed mathematically and mathematics surely could be derived from logic, then the universe had to be ruled by logic. This was not the way I saw things during most of my life and what I think is that I got carried away for a while there, but I will let my "scientific synthesis" stand as it seems plausible and I know I don't have the time left to find out the truth about the universe, if it ever outs. At any rate, astronomy turned out to be fascinating and crucial for me by chance, although it is likely I would sooner or later have come by the interests it aroused in me.

Despite the breadth of my musical education, I am disqualified in a quiz show and I spend some embarrassing moments at the podium  

Other experiences were inherently or circumstantially remarkable in varying degrees. Music would have been a favorite whoever taught it, but in the event it was a competent, high-strung young man who expressed unambiguously he found Bruckner boring--fair enough I thought, although in New York as a rule a Nazi favorite and one who was used to counterbalance Mahler would have been a bad starter--but when it came to Don Giovanni, a glorious but ramshackle work, and in this respect less good than Le Nozze di Figaro or Casi Fan Tutte, he cited Life magazine, hardly an authority, which had proclaimed it the "greatest work of Western Civilization". Despite this lapse in good taste, my music instructor achieved two things of lasting value for me: he put my appreciation of music in a historical context and he introduced me to the concept of musical forms.

      My interest in musical history resulted, among other things, in that I bought some collections of ancient European music and a five-record album of Gregorian Chant by the Solesmes choir which I do not think I actually listened to in its entirety. I might have but if so they must have been some of the most excruciating moments in my vast musico-phile experience, although I will admit that Gregorian Chant did sound much better on my frequent visits to The Cloisters and I always returned from them with the intention of really concentrating on enjoying it, which never worked, and if I did listen to all the pieces I had by the monks of Solesmes it must have been as background to something else I was doing.

      To be quite honest, most of my listening was done and still is in that disrespectful manner. If it had been otherwise I would not have been able to accumulate the enormous amount of knowledge I possess, which some unfairly describe as trivia. Besides, it did not prevent me from learning a huge number of melodies and motifs so well that all I need are three or four notes or chords to know I know whatever is being played. Identification can be instantaneous or it can take up to ten or more minutes, by which time I would have been disqualified in any quiz show, about the only way I would have profited from my musical expertise. I also learned entire scores in that way, but only in the sense that I can anticipate the notes as long as they conform a melodic or compact dramatic sequence and when composers most inconsiderately refuse to remain at that accessible level and insist on difficult bridging passages and developments and variations and cadenzas and so on, I have to wait for these to pass before taking up the baton once again, which would be most embarrassing on a podium.

      These frequent frustrations did provide an infallible insight into the difference between truly great music and the rest: if I can actually hum an entire piece such as, say, "The Poet and Peasant Overture", then no matter how much I might enjoy it, only talent was involved in its creation, but if I get stuck at some point in trying to recall music I also enjoy, that is the hallmark of genius. For example, I know I can dum-de-dum dum-de-dum dum-de-dum-dummmm the long exposition in the first movement of Mozart's Great G Minor Symphony, but for the life of me I can not bridge to the rest of it and if I had to try to do it I would spend an eternity, if I had an eternity to spend, just repeating over and over the same lines of music, and this no matter how great my passion for Mozart (the genius who did the bridging) would be hell indeed.

      I don't think in the absence of musical training I could have corrected this lamentable personal lack even if I had always concentrated on listening to all the music I have listened to--which would have meant neglecting my trivia-collecting--for I know that such experiences in disciplined listening have never solved my musical perplexities and in my solitude what music had on me was a cumulative emotional impact such that during the coda of the "Eroica" or of Brahms' Second Symphony I would get into a frenzy and start acting like a drug-crazed Yanomamo or a Masai doing his jumping-jack number either in a madscrabble search for a lion or after he gets the lion and wants every one to know it. I could keep these impulses under control in public, though barely, and I remember in particular the performance of the St.Matthew Passion I attended in London at a time I thought God would be nice to me if I showed a lot of contrition, which I blubbered through trying dissimulation with both hands though with what success I ignore.

      The other important lesson from the music course at Kings corrected the impression I had that music was free-flow--nothing is free-flow, not even ravings--and that compositions consisted of notes strung together according to a composer's ability to come up with melody or drama. In truth, I probably never thought about it--Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier", which I knew, should have disabused me of such notions--and it didn't take me long to understand that I had been listening to fugues, and not just to Bach's way of bragging about having come up with a good musical line, and that Haydn's prolificness had to involve some sort of shtick. This was the sonata form, which became for me a touchstone of musical appreciation and became the perfect sheet-anchor when I realized that my musical frenzies were not the muses reaching out to me through others but a form of derangement. It helped to ease me down to the attitude I now have in which I can listen to the entire Beethoven sonatas and not once start dancing like a dervish, or like one of my former country's plainsmen, whose musical rhythms appear in their fullest and finest expression in the third movement (allegretto) of "The Tempest". How this happened I can only explain as that Beethoven did so much experimenting in all aspects of composition that he was bound to come up with most everything that music is formally capable of, an idea which is borne out in literature with the example of Lope de Vega, a 17th-century Spanish dramatist who wrote so many plays (over 500) that one of them has the plot of Tristan and Isolde, a legend he had never in his life heard of.

Prof Duplex' overflowing optimism and the suicidal rats that might have done him in

In talking of interesting experiences at Kings, I have to mention the first philosophy class I attended in part because of its impact on me but mainly because of Professor Duplex, the man who taught it. I have not come across him in my philosophical studies in anything but a very minor role, but he knew his Hume backward and forward and he could explain with an indelible clarity the difference between a logical or apodictic relation and a causal relation. At this stage, I realize he was a simplifier and that it is not advisable to dismiss cause-and-effect as mere contiguity--somewhat like claiming that it is the shoe horn that makes my foot go into the shoe--but sometimes such simplifications are the first necessary step to higher levels of understanding, which on the other hand are not necessarily conducive to anything above the level of probability.

      Duplex would parade on the platform--it was the same cavernous auditorium in which Flyer emitted his blooper about Hemingway--with his thumbs stuck in his vest and dare the assembly of beginners to prove to him that what was happening in that room was not an hallucination. It was all bragadoccio of course because he would fling the challenge and give his own stock responses which he would then refute. But this too was illustrative and it would help me later see through a lot of the nonsense that passes for philosophical argumentation.

      Now, Duplex was, on top of a good expositor, an optimist of such overweening self-assurance that in comparison to him Leibniz, the man of the best-of-all-possible-worlds, might have been walking around Berlin shouting: "The end is near". Duplex smilingly exuded so much optimism that one of his students dared asked him once if he never entertained doubts of any kind and he told an anecdote he probably had on hand for such contingencies in which he awoke at the witching hour and through some inexplicable fluke did not immediately go back to sleep and instead heard something that sounded like rats chewing away at the electric wiring in his house, but then, as he put it, he turned to the other side and returned to his slumber as if the suicidal rats were singing a lullaby. Whatever the truth of this, many years later I read that Professor Duplex had been bludgeoned to death by robbers in his Westchester mansion. I didn't discard the possibility of very large, attention-craving rats. May he rest in peace, though not likely in the heavenly presence, which he most vehemently denied.

      Among the basic courses, the Western Civilization class I attended under Chuck Von Golden was one that in retrospect acquired an eldritch, almost incredible sheen, like the time in Nettown I had the visit of a TV rental repossessor--it wasn't me he was after but a previous tenant of that flat--in whom I recognized the taxi driver I hired on my first visit to London many years before, a coincidence I would still not believe if the man had not recognized me, and he cannot have been mistaken because he drove me from Gatwick to The Churchill on Portman Square, a long and expensive trip accountable by my inexperience of London airports. Attending young Von Golden's classes was considered a signal privilege because at the time he was the star of a hokey quiz show in which contestants matched knowledges and made what then were considered astronomical sums of money. Von Golden was close to becoming the top earner when he finally was stymied by a duh question like what was his second name. The entire nation hung on his answer, or on, as it turned out, his brow-wrinkling non-answer, and the dumbfoundment was as great as if Eisenhower had actually made a pronouncement in grammatical English.

      It was soon learned that Von Golden's agonized ignorance was contrived and that his quiz-show stardom and its demise had been planned beforehand, which again stunned a nation so sensitive to sincerity that no one could sleep well if Brinkley and Hunt did not kiss each other good night at the end of their news program. But it didn't surprise me who smelled a rat when Von Golden on one of his television appearances outside the quiz show pointed to a stack of books as high as his armpits and said they were his weekend readings. What it did do was clarify why in class he kept on about how Francis Bacon, the 17th century philosopher and convicted bribe-taker, was a misunderstood figure.

      I presume he did honestly justify to himself the quiz-show imposture as an educational exercise through which he could reach the untutored masses, a futile gesture anyway because the sector of the population he wanted to impress has only increased over the years and has even gained lexicological recognition as couch-potatoes. But I will always give him the benefit of the doubt, because it was his father, the poet Pete Von Golden, who gave me the satisfaction of reading to a huge class, in the same hall in which Flyer and Duplex taught, a paper I wrote on Kierkegaard, the Danish theologian the Dumbo confused with Swedenborg, even if he did stumble over one sentence which I think he did not approach the right way.

Fanny makes me feel like the Miraculous Mandarin without the ejaculation

If my activities at Kings had their ups and downs, outside of college things usually tended downwards. This is very relative because on balance usually the good moments cancel the bad ones but up close the latter have a tendency to colour their surroundings. Life-With-Mother was the usual drag and whatever romantic inclinations I might have had--Bill Preppy, true to form, introduced me to a dowdy Portorican girl I went out with once and never called back, for which he chided me as if he had dangled Susan Hayward in front of my yearning eyes--were usually stunted in the bud. I am not sure why this was, why, for instance, I did not go out every night or at least try to be more gregarious, and I could believe that my insistence on returning evenings to the suite, aside from the need to study as well as enjoying my contemplative, reclusive ways, might have had to do with a developing masochistic streak, which would conform to the death obsession I described before. What I am trying to say is that I probably would have been quite happy in The Walden by myself, but as The Walden meant Life-With-Mother I wasn't sure about what I really wanted and I began to feel like Buridan's ass, who starved to death because he couldn't decide between two identical bundles of hay, except that I knew enough to prefer being where, despite the inconveniences, I was fed once a week a delicious stack of French toast, not counting evening meals, and where I could enjoy a good night's sleep after the Moaning session had concluded.

      Aside from humping Nilda, there were the occasional females I enjoyed going out with. There are two distinctly pleasurable memories: a bicycle excursion to Washington Heights a lovely spring day and a night at The Moroccan Village with an older woman who was impressed by my story of The Carrion Rites (I told it like a joke), but there were no romantic involvements--the girl I went cycling with was too prognathous for my taste and anyway she later became a secular nun--until Fanny made her entry into my life.

      Fanny was not ravishing--she had a distant resemblance to Jane Wyman--and she had a moderate squint which her eyeglasses corrected but which to me was like a potent aphrodisiac when she took them off. I wanted so much too fuck her I fell madly in love. In a cinema where we were doing a lot of serious necking I urged her, I begged her, I implored her, to let me bed her, but she was reticent and finally asked as if that was the clincher: "But where?" Now, you might say: "My God, you were in New York!", but, and this is God's truth, I could not come up with a solution. The Walden was not advisable: even though I would have been willing to risk discovery by my mother, Fanny wasn't. She was staying at the Taxiarch's and there were always people around her. I did not have a car in which conceivably I could have done more than neck with her, nor the money for any hotel above the level of a flophouse, which anyway, despite my impassioned horniness, I had scruples about trying, or even suggesting to her.

      Still, I never lost hope and I followed Fanny around, drooling at the mouth like a cat in heat injected with hormones, until her couple of weeks in New York were over and she had to return to The Republic--what for me was like playing the part of "The Miraculous Mandarin" where he is repeatedly stabbed, for her was a Christmas holiday!--and I was left with a surplus of love and libido the size of the Statue of Liberty. This was I think my first experience in sexual obsession which then and on other occasions I transmuted into romantic passion. It goes some way towards explaining--if the inexplicable is explainable, which it is--the cause of various of my former marriages, real or presumed. In sum, I wanted to marry Fanny, I was willing to do anything to have her with me, but this I think anybody will understand as a compressed-spring effect produced by the cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof situation Life-With-Mother was for me.

      Since the understandably distressing Mexico night, I could not stand her physical closeness, although I did not realize the relation between the two until many years later, in all like those freaks that suddenly discover their parents did this or that and accuse them or sue them in court, but I never felt I had cause for suing because although my mother was guilty as hell she had not done anything that she herself considered reprehensible and all it had produced was a lot of confusing and quite bearable attitudes in me--for which anyway she, who liked physical shows of affection, was paying the price--and mainly because if I was going to sue I would have had to sue my father also and all I could sue him for was sleeping. It would have sounded like the indictment of a passer by for a murder committed across the street because he had not bounded and grabbed the killer or wrestled him down and taken away his weapon. This would have been in line with French existentialist arguments about universal guilt--nous sommes tous des assassins--but it wouldn't have cut much ice in an American court, where even a toy plastic hammer will crack a block the size of a glacier.

Neurosis rears its ugly head and I realize that Karamazov Sr, compared to me, might have been modelled on Buddha

It seemed monstrous to me that I should be so insensitive about my own mother and I was grateful for any example which proved I was not the heartless  monster I seemed to be, so you can imagine my rapture when I read the story of Raskolnikoff, the hero of Crime and Punishment, who apparently would have preferred going to bed with a door than give his mother a hug and a kiss. I told myself: "Here is me! This is I!" Dostoyevsky was definitely my kind of writer and he had the highest seal of approval at Kings, which obviously meant I too was in a privileged category, and I devoured his police thriller in one night and underlined passages which I went over and over uncritically comparing them to my own experiences.

      By then, even if I get a bit ahead of my story, I had read Freud and I believed that Dostoyevsky was a passionate eccentric with the odd habit of having fits when he was about to go on a gambling binge, which probably would have meant sure death if he had been able to visit Atlantic City or Las Vegas. Apparently his simulations of epilepsia took place only in Cannes where there was only one large casino and no slot machines.

      My Dostoyevsky obsession became so marked that he became my role model when years later I decided to do some dipping into dangerous terrains of experience, even though before I had written a satire in which a middle class stalker and a police inspector both fall passionately for the same mousy type and accuse each other of her murder on so similar evidentiary grounds that either could have been the culprit. It turned out that her husband, a pathetic downfallen type, did it.

      On close analysis, my affinity for Raskolnikoff was mistaken for various solid reasons: one, he did not kiss and hug his mother because he wanted to be left alone (he was living on his own St. Petersburg and not like me sharing a hotel suite with my mother); two, he gave his sister the same treatment he accorded his mother, so if he had been the victim of incestuous seduction it would have had to involve a mother-daughter coordination and even Dostoyevsky, the ultimate guilt freak, would not have gone that far; and third, Raskolnikoff was a half-mad killer and I was neither and the only thing we had in common was our love of prostitutes, but even here we differed because I loved mine raw and unrepentant and he liked them with a heart of gold and full of remorse. I didn't mind if mine made up to look like Nero's mother but his would have had no use for cosmetics.

      Besides, my passion for Fanny, in contrast to my inchoate romantic fantasies about Nilda, proved I was no whore-junky, although it did not necessarily mean it was genuine love and not some desperate way to disassociate myself from the The Walden suite. I think it really was love because of the consistency of my attraction to the physical "type" of women that was first prefigured in my childhood by Carmen--but for the squint, Fanny fit the bill quite nicely--but conversely I have observed through life a certain inconstancy in my affections that have made me doubt at various times whether I was able to experience love at all. However that may be, when Fanny left I was in an utter state of desolation and I immediately began writing a letter as immense as my desire.

      Writing has always been the ideal means for the expression of my ardours, which suggests a dual division of humanity: between those who do not keep diaries and those who do, like I used to. The distinction was made absolutely pellucid by George S. Kaufman, whose partner in adultery, Mary Astor, was found out in the diaries her husband stumbled on. When pressed by the press about how the scandalous affair came about he answered: "I don't keep a diary." This duality is as nonsensical as all others and, since they are just subjective appreciations with no pretensions to truth, they are good only for the occasional quip, like Kaufman's, which time swallows, and as I, the diary-keeper, was alive and Kaufman, the loutish non-diary-keeper, was dead, I had a decided advantage over him. As we are all bound to die, comparisons of this sort are not very demonstrative, but they are inevitable and may explain why the elderly open their newspapers to the obituaries rather than to the sports pages or the funnies, which used to be the reasons why people in America read newspapers at all.

Despite appearances to the contrary I could still tell the difference between feeling miserable and wiggling my toes

Returning to my case, no matter how compassionate I might be inclined to portray myself, I must admit I did not behave with due propriety towards Fanny. In fact, lack of propriety is much too mild an expression for unstable, irrational emotings next to which Karamazov Sr. might have been modeled on Buddha. Fanny did not have an answer ready for mailing as soon as my first letter arrived, which in the most likely hypothesis was impossible, but also probably because she was taking a balanced and mature view of our ephemeral New York relationship--she was somewhat older than I was--so I wrote a second tome, and when I didn't get an immediate response to that, I wrote a third tome, and when some days transpired and I heard nothing from her, I wrote a resentful letter in which I accused her of being a hetaira for not having acceded to letting me lay her, and as luck would have it, the day after I mailed that piece of unimpeachable logic, I received three letters from Fanny in a bundle which she sent through some visitor to New York.

      After I calmed down long enough to peruse her correspondence and found that what in essence she was saying was that marriage between us would have been slightly premature and mildly unrealistic--she definitely did not shut the door on me--I felt so devastated I tailspinned. I would have given anything bar nothing to have retrieved my previous letter and as obviously I couldn't because of the vagaries of postal service, which does not delay mail delivery to give time for a sender's change of mind, I wrote another letter, a brief, contrite one in true Dostoyevskian style, which Fanny this time did answer promptly saying something like: "See what I mean". And with this, I, who was hanging on by my fingertips on a slippery, sliver of an edge, fell down like James Stewart in the opening sequence of Vertigo.

      When I landed and miraculously survived, it was like being inside a cave as dark as Plato's but instead of just an ordinary, well-adjusted benighted soul I was more like a slimy, mangy cur, or the skunk my countrymen had so murderously pelted with potatoes back at Hellhole, in fact, Hellhole was heaven in comparison to the mood I was in, the worst part of which was a sense of complete loneliness and isolation. I stopped seeing Nilda and in general my social life went down to zero. My only interlocutor was myself in the notes I wrote down every day in which I tried to describe my feelings in a not very brilliant attempt to rid myself of them.

      These jottings did not even deserve the name of diary, but were so off the wall that later, in imitation of Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Trocchi's Cain's Book, I tried to make a novel out of them, but there was a slight miscalculation here in that, unlike these writers, I was not a drug-user and heroin-dependency for some reason lifts drivel to the summits where genius hobnobs with greatness in the minds of publishers. Possibly it is the spectacle of self-destruction that fascinates them, which makes one suspect they get their thrills by subsidizing addicts, although Burroughs did live to a ripe old age, but then, unlike Kerouac, he had independent means.

      I will admit that neurosis per se is a poverty-stricken ploy and that pathetic, pimply young men--I never had a problem with pimples!--are not as interesting as pathetic, scarified, needle-pushers. In defense of my gig, the concept of neurosis extended beyond my personal brief to history and it certainly sounded much more reasonable to describe the 20th century as neurotic than to call it a "junky", unless we mean "junk-loving", of which we did have a surfeit.

      Despite appearances to the contrary, I wasn't completely irrational, for I could still distinguish between feeling miserable and wiggling my toes and in my very private efforts to exorcise my obsessions, I would occasionally come up with verbal expressions--like, say, the implication of The Carrion Rites in the sense that life is brief--which relieved the pressure somewhat, but these were like styrofoam crutches and they worked for short periods and then started getting mushy and if I leaned on them hard a couple of times I would take a tumble like the comic Bombay beggars, one of the reasons why I could laugh at them without feeling pangs, the other being that when misery is widespread or too manifest it just begs for indifference.

      The point of the crutches was the Alfred E. Newman philosophy again, but, aside from my natural vanity, which rejected any resemblance to that gap-toothed moron, they were an attempt to hold back time and this was like Canute the Great flogging the waves, which earned him the epithet among Spanish historians, admittedly prejudiced, of Canute the Dumb. I would be tempted to expatiate on the holding-time-back bit, only I know it would be a waste of time, which sort of puts me between two fires, doesn't it?

      Neurosis, in brief, was the name of the game and it wasn't as unrelieved as I might be making it sound here. It affected the way I felt most of the time, but it did not prevent me, after having memorized the entire Frick collection, from starting to memorize all of the paintings in the Metropolitan and some, and only some, mind, in the Museum of Modern Art, also known as MOMA. I did on occasions go to the opera, where, however, my personal distraction had the embarrassing result that I was the only person in the fervorously silent audience who clapped at the end of an Easter season performance of Parsifal.

      I frequently also saw movies. My passion for these, which dated, as I have recounted, to my Miami years, but which had lain dormant in The Republic, was rekindled by the New York art cinemas--the Thalia was one of my frequent haunts--but my choice of films was usually not conducive to a gleeful frame of mind. Movies like Pagnol's Lettres de mon moulin were soothing, but Bresson's Pickpocket had an effect on me not unlike Crime and Punishment--also on shaky grounds, for I was making an existentialist hero our of a common hoodlum--and I left showings of Ikiru and Umberto D with moist eyes and the vague idea that I had witnessed something very very meaningful, but so grindingly depressing I have not had the courage to see those films again, which probably means that at the time for some reason I could empathize with dirty old men who were being kicked around by middle-aged dolts.

Randy Spyberg demands that I bring him "fresh dreams" and I get a chance to do like a perfect patsy

Now, concerning neurosis, I had read bits and pieces of Freud, who was hailed at Kings as a provocative observer of cultures--although to me, even then, many of his essays sounded like rigmarole--and inevitably the references in these excerpts to his psychological theories and his clinical methods led me to do my own delving into his works and into works about him, and thus I became acquainted with the Oedipus complex and the apparatus criticus, especially the theory of instincts, that went with it. To be quite frank, most of what I read didn't make much sense, but now and then I caught meanings that reverberated in my mind and they kept alive the idea, more like a hope or a lifeline, that somewhere among childhood sexuality and castration complex and so on I would discover the cause of why I couldn't put my mother and Fanny out of my mind and just enjoy wiggling my toes, which I knew I could do after a good night's rest--I had no insomnia problems then--and before I got up and got dressed and really became depressed in the IRT with the seedy looking drop outs around me. But there were hints also that I was maybe barking up the wrong tree and that my problem was the mangy spots I was developing all over my body.

      I had difficulties with the concept itself of Oedipus complex, although if it comes to that, the concept of complex didn't mean anything to me either, and still doesn't, but now I know, which I didn't before, that this is because its use means that you don't know what you are talking about. The castration idea was absurd. In the best of all lights, it assumed that fathers liked to play with scissors near their son's genitals. In the wildest scenario, it had every father threatening his male offspring with cutting their balls off if they misbehaved, especially like trying to fondle mama. I had read Sophocles and I could understand that he brought his downfall upon himself--although gouging out your own eyesockets did seem a bit much--but he hadn't lain his mother on purpose and here was Freud saying that every one wants to lay his mother the way I wanted to lay Carmen when I felt the first stirrings of my hormonal juices. That was definitely a category mistake (which doesn't mean anything either, by the way, but at least the non-complimentary intent is evident).

      There was also the question of instincts and here anybody who reads Freud is bound to come out much the worse for the wear, because he had so many ideas on the subject--the last version I think was Eros and Thanatos--that there was no way not to conclude that he was one confused thinker. As I was on my death-obsession jag, Thanatos did ring a bell, but that was all it did and the least I needed in my condition was a bell ringing in my head, which took me back to the unpleasant night of my appendectomy and the parish priest doing an impersonation of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Then there was the question, which should have been a giveaway, that Freud's neurotics were apron-tied, with a tendency to homosexuality, and I might have been anything but that, except to the extent of the maternal marriage that was contracted at my expense and without my consent.

      To complicate matters, even as I read Freud and his mostly verbal approach to neurosis, I was also reading Amiel, the Swiss masturbator I mentioned before, and from Amiel I went on to the Spanish psychiatrist Gregorio Marañon, who argued, more or less, that Dante was also a masturbator--because of his idealized love for Beatrice--and that he and Amiel masturbated because they were picky about the women they wanted to get involved with. I could imagine them like Marius and his chums perched on tree branches and making like a strong wind among the leaves.

      What complicated matters for me, who had few scruples about laying with whores, was that Marañon also said that the difference between masturbators like Dante and Amiel and the garden variety like me was hormonal and this made feel even more mangy than before and so sexually isolated--this was about the time I was spat at by the ungraceful and ungrateful little bitch I looked at twice in the street--that I was afraid I could end up dead in a hospital with a broom stuck up my rectum. Luckily, in the end what seemed like common sense prevailed and I went back to Freud's brand of psychological quackery, as well, incidentally, as to the belief that a masturbator is a masturbator and that Amiel and I were more alike then we were different.

      The last nail in the coffin of psychoanalysis was driven by Randy Spyberg, the quack I alluded to before whom I met through the Taxiarch's refusal to accept his quack proctologist's suggestion that his prostate problem was hypochondriacal. So here was this pair of quacks--I think there were other quacks involved, more like a congress, and I only mention the two so as not to get too technical--bouncing the Taxiarch back and forth from one end of Fifth Avenue to the other, and when my irritation with my own affairs began to tell, specifically the day for no special reason I told the Taxiarch at lunch he was a bird-brained jughead, he suggested I visit Spyberg and as I was so fed up with just about everything I took him at his word, but I did so only because I wasn't making heads or tails of Freud and his explicators and I thought that perhaps a fully licensed practitioner of his art could help enlighten me. Thus it was that from Freudian theory I went to Freudian practice and this was like doing a post-grad on neurosis.

      I will say about my psychoanalytic experience that I behaved as if I was following a script written by Freud himself. The day I arrived at Spyberg's office a person was leaving who looked as if he had just been told he was going to have kittens--he was twitching all over like Mr.Hyde walking down the Champs Elysées--and I told the quack I was there only on the Taxiarch's suggestion and not because there was anything urgent I needed to see him about, certainly nothing like whatever was ailing his previous patient. Now this was patsy stuff and Spyberg said without a blink: "Oh yes, that was a colleague who came to talk to me about a patient we are treating together", which was a lie so transparent even a child with a bed-wetting problem could have seen through.

      Before I left, the Freudian quack told me to bring him "fresh dreams" because old ones were not to be trusted, which sounded like something a cook would tell his fishmonger, and I obliged the next session with a dream about a landscape in which there was a tree from which I was trying to hang some one. Now, this particular oniric incident could have applied to a lot of people I could think of, but old Randy, who now knew the patsy he was dealing with, told me right off the bat, as if he was the Yankee Clipper himself putting a rookie replacement pitcher in his place, that he, and none other, was the real object of my hanging frenzy because I resented his prying into my subconscious. I did not remember having seen Mr Spyberg in my dream--long before Bob Dylan, I invented the line: "I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours"--and his interpretation smelled fishy, but I was perfectly willing to go along with the charade.

After a futile attempt at a GUT, I am left, like Porgy, with "plenty of nuttin"

Sad to say, the rest of our sessions--they must have been eight or so--were mostly bullshit and he never again reached the heights of percipience he showed at the start, but in the end he pronounced me cured and I did feel much better than I had when I first went to his office. I felt so light-headed I did a handspring in my room, which was large as hotel rooms go but not spacious, and I scraped and damaged with my shoes a recording of Bach's Suites for Orchestra on the side of numbers Three and Four. This was the kind of joyous music that could have reflected my mood and my impromptu enthusiasm and its result were symbolic of what later occurred, which was that, after the effects of the drugs Spyberg had been pumping into me wore off--so much for couch-analysis--I went into another slider not quite as pronounced as my previous one but steep enough for me to be convinced that Freudianism was fraudulent and more to the point that I was still a neurotic. As I did not this time reach the post-Fanny nadir, I was able to stand on The Walden's roof--I don't know how I managed to get there because hotels are very strict about guests wandering on their rooftops--where I recalled Lightning Bolt Night in The Republic and re-dedicated myself to the purpose for which I was in life, which was essentially to discover why I was having such circular revelations and why they filled me with hope and not despondency.

      These changes of mood were accompanied by further intellectual developments that left a very persistent imprint and led eventually to the break up of Life-With-Mother. Concretely, one of the results of my artificial exuberance was that reading Marcus Aurelius for the first time I was able to take his pep-talks to himself at their face value and make them work. I grasped with due firmness that the world is what the mind wants to make of it and that a noble and rational person will understand and forgive what ignoble and irrational persons do. Some time before I had read Erasmus' In Praise of Folly, which was the funniest book I had ever had in my hands, but there were no strictly moral guidelines to be derived from it until Marcus Aurelius offered me the perfect complement to that experience: the world is indeed folly and to be able to bear with it I had to do as the Roman emperor did. As at first his Meditations did wonders for me, I forgot that Marcus Aurelius was an emperor and that emperors can afford the luxury of giving the world the finger whereas if I tried it I would be risking an unfriendly response, unless I only did it figuratively and there were limits to the satisfaction I could derive from that. Even so, Marcus Aurelius did yeoman duty for me for a long time and more importantly he was part of the philosophical process I was undergoing at Kings.

      Though officially my major at Kings was English literature, I tend to think with some justification that it was really philosophy, despite not having taken enough strictly philosophical courses for it to be even considered a minor. But that just goes to show that at Kings, as was my intention, I carried on my own program of studies based more on what I wanted from the courses than on the courses themselves. As usual with these pronouncements, they must be taken with a pinch of salt.

      There were basic requirements, especially during the first two years, and they were crucial to my intellectual formation, which from my readings in my library in The Republic was hardly adequate, but after that I was on my own and what I did was fulfill the requirements for an English major and flit around in search of lights without getting too serious about anything in particular. In New York, my search, which had commenced on Lightning Bolt Night with the quick jottings I made on my state of mind, was premised on this non-punctate thought: "I am stuck with the Moaning, so how did the universe get started?" Alternatively: "Moaning is part of the scheme of things, so what is the scheme of things?" This was as if I had been given a broom and told to sweep every floor in the Empire State Building, because when I tried to get a handle on the "scheme of things" I didn't know where to begin and I doubted that I was up to the task. Theoretically it was possible, but obviously it would take a very long time and surely as I finished a lot of floors, no matter how thoroughly, the first one would be in need of recleaning, as would successively all the other floors, and by the time I completed that task, I would be back where I started again. I would be Achilles trying to catch up with the hare, eternally crossing mid-points of mid-points, fated perhaps to become the Incredible Shrinking Man.

      I knew that such grand projects--in physics they call them GUTs, which is what mostly they require--had been accomplished by Aristotle, St. Thomas, Comte, and others, and what they seemed to involve was a taxonomy or classificatory outline. My own attempts resulted in a lot of empty categories and I wasn't even sure that I was encompassing much of reality or whatever, so the result was that like Porgy I had "plenty of nuttin", although I had the advantage over him in that I knew where Fanny lived and he just left for Chicago on the off-chance of finding Bess, who probably would have been too addled to recognize him. This travesty of life in the cotton belt, by the way, is one of the reasons blacks dislike Jews, who think the world of it and scratch their heads over the blacks' ingratitude.

I finally get to attend philosophy lectures by the GMH (the Great Man Himself), but I feel disgusted by his ass-wiggling routine

I soon gave up on my GUT and had to settle for painstaking diary-keeping and reading around the edges of philosophy--which is how I met Marcus Aurelius, as I had Erasmus before--and occasionally forayed into "real" philosophy. In the philosophical outskirts, and as befits a fine old American institution like Kings, I also met a terrific trio who enthralled me with promises they never kept because either they weren't really making them (I was imagining them) or they did not have the means to deliver. They were Emerson, William James, and John Dewey. Emerson said something to the effect that each individual soul contains the universe, and wasn't that exactly like offering an ice cold beer to a sweaty, fagged out field worker like me? He was good with such pronouncements, but they only served to ratify my own GUT premise and I already knew how far I had got with that. Nevertheless, I read some of his sentences over and over like mantras, which could be a reason I never gave up, even in the most delusional episodes during my dips period, on my quest for understanding what exactly was going on inside my mind.

      James taught me that in philosophy one could argue just so far and after that it was a matter of choice. To this fundamental lesson I added that after choosing one had to go back and wipe away the traces of the spurious arguments leading to the choice. For instance: Heidegger had argued within himself a great deal before deciding that the basis for morality was facing up to death with courage, and this arbitrary decision was the cornerstone of Sein und Zeit, in which he did such a good job of covering his tracks that I, who was going through my death-obession cycle, found his arguments compelling--they were on a borderline between total obscurity and total enlightenment--and I filled a metal file with note cards on his work. I have been intending for years to computerize those cards and write commentaries on my commentaries, but I probably won't, and for the same reason--that time is running short--I did my rickety synthesis on relativity, which, by the way, in the long view I now possess is more important (even if I only have inklings and analogies) than the thinking of a man who didn't have sense enough to distinguish between his courageous embrace of his own mortality and Hitler's badly digested and deleterious regurgitations.

      As to Dewey, I know he spoke directly to me, but what he said either I knew already or I totally assimilated, for now I have trouble distinguishing between him and the inventor of the Dewey decimal system for stacking books. Dewey was basically a Kings icon, like Flyer, the liberal par excellence, whose reputation was made from his work on the obscure headmaster Matthew Arnold, an essayist and poet he didn't even push too much in his course on great modern writers.

      Other minor philosophical luminaries I encountered and enjoyed were Lucretius, another brilliant synthesizer with an iron grip, and Sextus Empiricus, who proved beyond any possibility of doubt that the senses were unreliable. It could be argued that he was the original idealist and that he laid the foundations for Descartes and Berkeley and even Hume, but when I wanted to use him in my own philosophical construction I only came up with anodynes and clichés. These readings were rewarding, but probing deeper philosophical waters was discouraging.

      After science in Western Europe went its separate way from philosophy--probably with Newton, who was a great scientist but philosophically no better than a specialist in reading chicken entrails--philosophers became insecure. This insecurity has only grown over time and at Kings it showed in the course I signed on by the Great Man Himself, alias GMH. I don't remember his name. I don't even know if I ever knew it. If he had one, it was only mentioned by others in a respectful but undecipherable mumble.

      GMH gave his lectures to myriad silent heads in a big dark hall--they probably shaded the windows on purpose--from a lectern on a podium where the only light in the room shone on his notes, which reflected on his fat bespectacled face and on the outline of his pachydermous bulk. But it was not easy to gain access to that benumbing experience. From what I can now recall, GMH was going to give a course on the whole of philosophy and as there was no mind capable of fully encompassing what we were going to be privy to, it was necessary to separate us into different sub-groups according to the different philosophical disciplines with a subordinate instructor, or maybe, since GMH was surely a full professor, an assistant professor, in charge of each subgroup. I chose ethics.

      I don't remember how many times I was in the remote presence of GMH, but I remember distinctly him saying that Plato's dialogues were basically bull sessions, and that was nothing compared to my astonishment when he graphically portrayed the soul's stirrings towards the world of ideas by vigorously wiggling his fanny. What really astonished me was that no one laughed but after my humbling experience at the conclusion of Parsifal I was not about to commit another horrendous public gaffe. What I did was a GMH on GMH, or more accurately, on my assistant professor, whose explicatory interventions alternated with GMH's own apparitions.

      I wrote an extensive paper in which I did a synopsis of all important ethical doctrines since Aristotle concluding they were built fundamentally on the same understanding. Now, this was either an impertinent yap or it was a brilliant coup. I never got my paper back--I like to think that GMH himself kept it, which goes to show I was not that unappreciative--so I cannot remit the subtleties of my analysis, but I do recall that my greatest challenge was reconciling utilitarianism, a biggie at Kings--I had my fill of Jeremiah Bentham and John Stuart Mill, not to mention pragmatism and the writings of William James--with such non-ulterioristic doctrines (not counting heaven of course) as "Judaeo-Christianity", another biggie at Kings, and Kant's moral imperative.

      I inclined somewhat towards the belief that morality must have something to do with well-being and what I had to do was argue that Aristotle and Christ and Kant were utilitarians at heart. I am sure the intricacies of my development of the subject must have been sound because I got a B in that course and the average grade was an F+. In my heart of hearts, though, what I learned at Kings was that, if GMH was right and Plato's dialogues were not to be taken too seriously, then all of ethics was a psitacistic assembly in which what counted was the plumage. I have stuck to this conviction through thick and thin, although I did not agree with GMH's ex cathedra dismissal of Plato, whose Republic, however fascistic it may seem, was perhaps the culminating, non-pareil experience of my college career.

Reading Nietzsche was like going up smiling to a psychotic wielding a club

My own dismissal of ethics was based on something I read in St.Augustine to the general effect that sin was not a result of ignorance but of knowing your duty and not doing it. I certainly did not consider sex a sin, but I most definitely frowned on murder, only, like most ordinary citizens, and most emphatically unlike Raskolnikoff, this was not something I felt I could commit--a wrong assumption, as shall be seen--so what was Augustine talking about? I knew a good many centuries separated us and that perhaps in his time sex was taken more seriously than homicide--Augustine after all had died during the siege of Hippo by the Vandals--but that did not make any difference to the formal relevance or irrelevance of his ethical strictures: either they meant something in any concrete situation at any moment in time or they didn't.

      There was another difference which was that he believed in hell and I did not, but again I asked myself: of what use is a morality which enjoins what you would naturally do rather than taking the toilsome bother of being sinful and ending in the clutches of Satan, which was comparable to being smeared with lots of bad-smelling grease and swimming the English Channel and throwing up and getting cramps and what not and then saying you actually hadn't done it? Nietzsche, a figure I did not value adequately at Kings, kept insisting that do-gooding was for IRT-riders and all that got him was a bad case of schizophrenia.

      He was the kind of thinker you can dislike on impulse if you have certain kinds of ideas. I was democratically inclined and very given to compassion. Reading Nietzsche was like going up smiling to a psychotic wielding a club. You get out of his way fast but you don't forget him. I eventually got a handle on him when I took the trouble of actually reading Kant on ethics and found to my astonishment, and admiration I must add, that he (Kant) admitted his arguments about moral behaviour were humbug. As Kant also recognized it was impossible to demonstrate that God exists, what Nietszche said about ethics being for low-brows was in the way of an inevitability.

      Nietzsche also had no illusions about history. That it wasn't about justice and injustice wasn't so hard to understand, but that, as Nietzsche claimed, it was about the inevitable rise of mediocrity required a lifetime's experience, unless you were brilliant like Nietzsche, and if schizophrenia was the price to pay for wisdom, it maybe wasn't worth it, or so it seemed then to me not being aware of my own incipient paranoia ("incipient" itself possibly an underestimate). Even acknowledging that club-wielding Nietzsche was "right"--these propositions are not exactly what you could call "matters of fact"--did not guarantee enlightenment because I am still torn between the torture-the-torturers thing and complete indifference. But don't judge me before you finish my tale.

      As to Augustine I never swallowed his horror stories of gaming, whoring, and drinking in Rome, where he was probably on a holiday from the sanctimonious regime at his home in Hippo under Monica, his saintly mother, possibly not unlike my own Life-With-Mother. The Augustinian argument and my own reply to it could, incidentally, lead to the madness of the character who wanted to be totally good and buried people alive just to prove that he could be really mean. On the question of ethics, I have ended up by believing that it is about social training, which means that ethical could be not taking a leak in a crowded restaurant because the mens room is locked, although I probably already knew this at Kings from my Pavlovian thing about hotels and death.

      All in all, my further excursions into philosophy at Kings, on the slim basis I had from The Republic, were leisurely and personal and it would be decades later that I would devote my life, for various years, almost exclusively to philosophical activities, which I undertook still carrying the question of what to do with neurosis, not any more as a personal issue--it was something I got used to, like a mule to its burden--but as a concept I still had to fit into some system of ideas. I only got around to doing this at the end of a long journey in which I didn't think about neurosis even if it was neurosis that got me started on that journey.

      At the stage I was at in Kings, philosophy didn't help in any personal way, least of all in getting over Fanny, whom I went after as soon as I could, still under the feel-good haze quack Spyberg's injections had induced in me. This chase was to be expected as with each closing of the academic year Life-With-Mother was suspended for trips back to The Republic. There my old friend and travelling companion "Sancho Panza" would be waiting for me to do further explorations of The Republic's geography.

It was grand feeling to be under the scorching sun with Jaime Tovey, drinking daiquiris from a cooler, in all like contented talking lizards

On one of our excursions, accompanied by Jaime Tovey, it rained so hard during a long and complicated trip in a mountainous region that all the rivers were in spate, most bridges were down, and for a moment I could almost believe I was going be stuck forever in a remote cloud-covered village called Carandache, where the only distraction we had was listening to Colombian politicians making promises in speeches so brilliant you wouldn't have suspected the country was not that far from its near take over by coca barons and its subsequent fall into social war with landowners and their minions herding peasants into churches and burning them alive and guerrilla leaders wearing Khmer Rouge-style scarves, lording it over swaths of territory the size of Switzerland, and, when things got dull, kidnapping their grandmothers, who played along by pleading with the government to release all prisoners who claimed they were innocent.

      Tovey, a good speechifier, admired these politicians so much I heard him say once: "Ah, I recognize that beloved voice", which was as if in America people had gotten misty-eyed over one of Clinton's lip-biting public apologies for the escapades of what Alberto Moravia called the "other self". To compensate for the bone-rotting wetness Jaime and I afterwards crisscrossed a desert and it was the grandest feeling to be under the scorching sun following tracks amidst the scrub with a single peak in the distance--called the equivalent of Pocahontas' Tit--drinking from a cooler filled with crushed ice, lemon syrup, and white rum, and sweating profusely ensconced in the seats of our uncovered Jeep, in all like contented talking lizards. One night we slept in hammocks in the house of a bootlegger who claimed his rotgut was nourishing because he used leavening for quick brewing. This entrepreneur was to gain fame as the man who laid out the strips for the beat-up Beechcrafts used on drug pick-ups and subsequently abandoned in Florida airports or sometimes ditched at pre-arranged rendezvous points in mid-ocean.

      Jaime's loyalty to his country's politicians was rewarded with a governorship, followed by the top secretarial position to the Presidency, and then another high administrative appointment. He was an honest man, who never fiddled the public till, and later, out of work and out of money, he lost a leg to phlebitis and became obsessed with belongings as if to compensate for his missing limb. He died not long afterwards from frustration and bitterness.

      These trips to The Republic, in which the Managing Editor released me from bondage on the assumption I wouldn't have enough time to pull any really crazy stunt, were precisely the occasions when I planned how best to surprise him. To do this, it is conceivable I might have gone all the way with Fanny, whom I found in such a forgiving mood I didn't have to do so much pleading to have her gratify my desire, but she turned out to be a one-nighter. When she started putting me off and acting as if she were a Vestal, I got fed up and left town. She was no virgin and as I gave her all I had, which was enough occasionally to make multi-functional Nilda come, I know it couldn't have been anything I did wrong.

      This incident should have taught me a lesson about the nature of passion and its gratification, but it didn't, or maybe it was that when the lesson might have been of some use I was not interested in remembering. What I was remembering were the bad times with Life-with-Mother and when my welshing cousin Marius, then immersed in his law studies, introduced me to a group of friends I immediately discerned one I thought I could do business with. In a flash, that is how the story of my first marriage begins. But before I get to that, I think it is convenient that I bring happenings in The Republic up to approximately the historical period I reviewed before in connection with the astronomy class, because they indirectly affected my own attitudes towards authority and the order of things, especially as the Managing Editor expected it to remain.

The conspirators had plenty of firepower, but the commander of a tank battalion got confused in an interchange and he headed in the wrong direction

Tyrannos Marcus had become overconfident. Nowadays heads of state have become more sensitive to public opinion--even aspiring or actual dictators occasionally have second thoughts about details like pulling out finger nails or leaving mass graves about--but in my former country this trend has its own peculiarities. Come election time, opinion polls in The Republic are very important though mostly for bragging, because mass psychology is winner-oriented. This means that, for some reason, people like bragging about having supported the candidate they will inevitably later be badmouthing, which is like putting on skis and saying: "I know I am going to break a leg, I just know it". Once the polling booths close, the winner is god and voters are suckers, especially to the winner, who knows exactly how he made it and that was by telling a bunch of lies. It is conceivable the future winner might have believed his own lies, but that did not entail he had to stick to all of them when he became a god.

      Now, if this is the way it worked under democracy, under the sort of regime Tyrannos Marcus established people weren't smart enough even to know what they wanted to hear. They were in effect being told: "Hey, assholes, you don't really want to hear that, do you? This is what you want to hear, right?" The Managing Editor, who had shown some moderate spunk during the previous electoral fraud, was a suspect man and to make matters worse he had the bravery to spurn a government offer of an embassy. In fact, he did a lot of travelling during my years in New York although I have no idea where he went.

      Tyrannos Marcus had a very weak flank: he had no charisma whatever, he was no orator, and he was short, fat, and bald and used glasses, all of which he tried to compensate with bemedalled and beribboned uniforms in all possible hues of white, black, kakhi, and brown, which he wore with all kinds of military head gear, about the only part of the military regalia he did not use with his military-style pajamas with embroidered medal-boards and epaulettes. In short, he was no Perón, although he admired the Argentine Tyrannos and gave him asylum when he was kicked out by generals who, whatever they might have said about their motives, were up to no good.

      When Tyrannos Marcus did the electoral fraud routine a second time, a lot of other military, who felt they had the right to wear as many uniforms as he did, began to conspire. The conspiracy erupted on a New Years Eve. The conspirators had plenty of firepower, but one of the leaders got his bearings confused and instead of leading his tanks towards the Presidential Palace he headed in the opposite direction--he later claimed he got confused in an interchange--and Tyrannos Marcus managed to suppress his envious colleagues. By appealing to those officers who had almost as many uniforms as he did, he imposed emergency rule and a curfew and he rounded up a lot of civilians who grew beards in jail and later told horrifying tales of unbearable tortures like missed breakfasts and being denied cigarettes.

      The people's suffering became so acute they took to the streets until one ungrateful officer--Tyrannos Marcus was army and this one was navy and so technically he could wear practically as many different uniforms as his boss--turned coat, or more accurately put on his finest, showiest Admiral's costume, upon which Marcus stuffed a suitcase with $100 bills and took a DC3 to the nearby country of an older, more experienced Tyrannos, where, after a quick partition of the suitcase's contents, he was allowed to stay while he got his act together.  

      Ex-Tyrannos Marcus' bitter-sweet post-overthrow destiny is interesting and pertinent enough to merit a brief retelling. As he was the holder of every American decoration except the Congressional Medal of Honor and maybe the Purple Heart, he asked and received asylum in Miami. However, in America Kennedy beat Nixon by two votes and in The Republic his old ally and now revengeful, democratic president Romulus was gunning for him and as Kennedy was under the absolute control of development economists--some say he was their Manchurian candidate--who saw in my former country the perfect place to make their doctrines shine, Kennedy ordered Marcus held and extradited to his unwelcoming homeland. There he spent two or three years in comfortable confinement and when he was finally released he took a flight to Spain where he established his home and legend has it that he gives the finger to every American tourist he sees in the street.

      Curiously, for I must admit it is not consistent with my previous exposition of electoral politics in The Republic, ex-Tyrannos Marcus made something of a comeback in his land barely ten years after he was kicked out although he wasn't offering voters anything whatsoever, which probably means that he might have been right in his assessment of their intelligence. But Romulus's cohorts were in charge and when Marcus returned home to collect the benefits of the electoral near-defeat he inflicted on his enemies, they resorted to the democratic method of mobbing him at the airport and the ex-Tyrannos and neo-dimwit opted for taking the next plane back to his home in Francoland.

Black Donkey, or The Man who got shortchanged by Dracula's tailor

Naturally, events during the process of Tyrannos Marcus' overthrow did not go unnoticed in the New York community of expats. New York being New York the exiled Politicians converged there and the wheeling and dealing began even before the Tyrannos had been deposed. Romulus led the pack, but he did not yet have a mandate so he had to maneuver with caution, though nothing like the Managing Editor, who had made a fortune with a newspaper he bought during Marcus' dictatorial rule, and one which had belonged to Romulus's followers, the same thuggish bunch that later nearly lynched the former Tyrannos when he had proven more popular than his persecutors.

      As he had gained if not his spurs at least a horse blanket through his show of opposition to the Tyrannos, the Managing Editor was received by the Politicians on a footing of equality, but he was not by any means a big contender for power. For that he lacked the vocal chords--like the Taxiarch's, his voice was reedy with a tendency to squeak, whereas Romulus's was like a loud nasal croak--and he had no ideas whatsoever.

      This is another conundrum because he was neither dumb nor comparatively uncultivated, yet he seemed to accept a mediocre billing in a circus made up of freaks and performers such as the fearless tight-rope walker who never left the ground higher than three feet or the trapeze artists who spent more time bouncing on the safety net than practicing their act. In other words, it was unnecessary to be a John Locke or a Rousseau to compete with The Republic's Politicians--a smattering of development economics might have sufficed--yet the Managing Editor either did not believe in ideas or he did not believe that expressing them was worth the candle. My conclusion would have to be that he was in that company to defend his interests but since he never showed an entrepreneurial bent I really have to throw up my hands and admit I am stumped.

      After he got over his fright about the newspaper--although not entirely because he was pessimistic and melancholic by nature--and he could have entered politics through the front door, all he asked for and got was the Embassy in Belgium. This contrasted with exiles such as Black Donkey who claimed he had suffered broken bones at the hands of Tyrannos Marcus' security police, a patent falsehood as every one knew he was a former toady and had been kicked out for some deal he didn't cut Marcus into. Black Donkey liked wearing a black half-cape with red-lining which made him look as if he had been shortchanged by Dracula's tailor and he used to tell the same anecdote about a donkey throwing off its load, supposedly a parable, and probably the reason he got his nickname. He was past master, maybe even the genius, of the "undertone gambit", which consists in talking in a low voice always as if one has some world-shattering revelation to impart. It seemed to work, for Romulus named him Minister of the Checks when The Republic was undergoing a terrible economic crisis and he went at it headlines blaring in the media, but since my former country has been stuck in Rostow's pre-pre-take off stage for the last half century I don't think he achieved much, which is also about the kindest thing you can say for any of Black Donkey's democratic predecessors and successors.

      I was a witness to these uninspiring goings on and after the exiles returned I also met the new batch of expats, which also were rather uninspiring. I never even tried participating in the proceedings--I assumed the Managing Editor knew what he was doing--and if they left something in my mind it was scorn. Here again I exaggerate and my feelings were closer to indifference, although during the height of the rebellion against Tyrannos Marcus I did pen a little poem about will-powers, but then I had also written a poem on Hungary based on a photograph of a dead soldier covered with lime and a wound in the back of his head the size of a small melon.

      I could also be exaggerating the indifference because when I went back to The Republic that summer (winter there, as explained) I got into the spirit of things and insulted a traffic cop who tried to tell me a red light meant stopping and I indulged in other frightfully subversive activities to such a degree I decided that, just as the envious Military had challenged and expelled Tyrannos Marcus, there was no cause for me to continue living under the tyranny of Life-With-Mother no matter what the Managing Editor might have contracted for me, so I went one day and married Candice without consulting anybody or even common sense. Needless to say the Apocrisiary was furious.

      One obvious conclusion from this affair was that my rebelliousness had not been crushed, but, as motives go, this was not an auspicious start to a marriage. You could say that it had come about because the Apocrisiary had overdone the punishment-and-control policy he adopted towards me after my expulsion from The Mount. My defiance must have surprised him and for some enigmatic motive--maybe he was used to having me under him, and enjoyed making me squirm--he resorted to the bribery of paying for my final year at Kings. That the Managing Editor was not as sporting as I make him sound about my rebellious nuptials would really be an understatement, like having some one confess to a mild dislike for nausea; and, on my part, I was not interested in having him relent. I had resurrected the Republican Central University law studies project, which Candice was not too keen on, for it was on her that I would be counting while I got on my feet and that could take a hell of a long time. In fact, although his generosity was not unwelcome nor entirely welcome for me, there is no doubt whatever in my mind that Candice was doing a mental fandango, and I will say for her that if I was disillusioned about The Republic she had never had any illusions whatsoever.

New Jersey shifted the blame for the hothouse effect on the Brazilians because the Sumatrans were having none of it

In New York Candice and I set up housekeeping in a tiny apartment, on the 23rd floor of The Master. It was like a bubble floating over the Hudson. Sunsets coloured the sky a deep red for hours which was one of the first indications that New Jersey was provoking the hothouse effect and the destruction of the earth, until somebody there came up with the explanation that it was mainly Brazilians and Sumatrans doing it, and of the two the Brazilians, who were more accommodating, were the really guilty party.

      I went back to my routine at Kings but I did not see The Walden again until many years later and I have no idea where my mother was staying. But I knew she was OK. The break up of my previous illegitimate "marriage" resulted in that it was in my senior year that the pieces of my college education began to come together. My grades were straight A's and I wrote arguably my best paper on literature. Ironically, or appropriately (given the pejorative things I said before about my major), it was not on English literature but on the stream-of-consciousness monologues at the end of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, which, as I explained in my paper, had the coherence of a carefully crafted oration and showed that James Joyce had invented nothing, except, from among a huge heap of tongue-twisters and paronyms, the word quark. I felt so cocksure about my essay that in an aside under the title I directed the reader to the marrow of the work after the introduction. This was also a precautionary measure in case my professor was a Joyce-lover, for I started by saying that to read Finnegan's Wake in its entirety, rather than jumping about the text like a spooked hare, you had to be a masochist or a desperate insomniac.

      At some point, I asked myself two questions: what had I gotten out of Kings and how had the project of following my own curriculum resulted? Actually, I never asked any such thing, but looking back I feel those are the questions that should be asked to put an end to this period of my life and go on to the next. Besides, although I did not explicitly ask those questions, I had answers to them, which shows that I probably did have a pair of such questions in the back of my mind.

      The private curriculum project had only mediocre results if judged by the purposes and expectations of Lightning Bolt Night, for I was as neurotic in my senior year as I had been as a freshman and I had not found any formula that would explain the phenomenon of neurosis either on an abstract or a personal basis. In other words, I only had Freud's word for neurosis and I didn't know what he was talking about. To me it was a serious condition, but for years what I perceived was that it had to do with Jewish jokes about chicken soup and tap dancing old women. If that was neurosis, then what I had deserved a more dignified appellation, like utter tedium or, a term that has come up before but which first cropped up in my studies at Kings, anomie. I found it in Durkheim and it seemed to apply to a kind of social alienation like mine, but Durkheim had also argued that marriage, contrary to my cousin Marius's strongly held opinion, benefitted men more than it did women, and if Marius's could see through that one, who couldn't? Yes, I had a bad case of anomie, but that was like saying I was prone to allergies and never knew when I would catch one. It was also like experiencing angst, which happened to hit me every time I had a hangover, and that left a lot of room for ambiguity. In brief, I didn't know what I was trying to cure and so nothing much I did at Kings was bound to have a therapeutic effect.

      But I did in other respects get a great deal from my college education as I imbibed it within the curriculum I improvised for myself along the way. Philosophy and ethics I have already alluded to, as well as to other disciplines and studies. The answer to the big question of what I had learned at Kings was not to be found in specific areas. It had to do with anomie alright, but with the sort that originally came from my biculturalism, which at Kings was finally interred by my total identification with--Fanfare!--Western Civilization. This became the undergirding of my thought even in the dark days when I believed that Ho Chi Minh and Castro had reserved for themselves the highest honour that selfless Marxist militancy could bestow, namely, mummification (the darkness lay in that I did not see this in a satirical light but as a merited collective tribute, which means those were "dark days" indeed).

      The conviction of where I belonged spiritually and intellectually was not solely the doing of Kings. It was a synergy between the college and the city, for I do not think I would have obtained what I did from basic courses on the history of Western thought if I had not been living in a place which itself was living, awesome proof of what it was capable of achieving. Withal, New York left much to be desired--I'll leave the IRT out of it this time--for it seemed to me but a pale reflection of a brief moment in my own past: when I had been in Europe in my childhood, even if at the time my memory had not yet developed the faculty of recall and what I really knew about that trip I had gotten from old family snapshots, which, from a certain but valid perspective, is like expressing nostalgia for a world in which Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito, not to mention old Stalin, were very influential personages.

      But don't get me wrong! I never had the foolish idea that being in Toulouse or Venice per se was the key to happiness. Even today, when I dare admit, with envy gnawing at every bone in my body, that my heroes are Souren Melikian and John Julius Norwich, I know it isn't because they spend their lives surrounded by art and its history, but because they have earned the right to be in that position, whereas I could right now be crossing the bridge at the Uffizzi and feel as alienated as I feel stuck in the traffic in Edsa and I would prefer to remain forever in this purgatorial heat, sweating like a baboy, than ever return to Europe as a tourist, even if I had millions and lived from one five star hotel to another and ate and drank only the specialities recommended in the Michelin Guide.

      But as usual I lie, or at least, I exaggerate, and anyway at Kings that wasn't my attitude to tourism at all. In my frequent solitary walks along Riverside Park I would recall Garcia Lorca's A Poet in New York and all I could think of was Granada and that I would have been willing to give anything to be there, which was the inconceivable dream for I was entertaining no illusions about the possibility of settling in Europe and devoting my life to the humanities, quite a few notches above the time I had wasted in previous years on prostitutes.

      Intense as this sounds, it is but the necessary pre-condition for why it was I crossed the line separating "Mire" and "Dips", a process that began when the Managing Editor without any previous hint, as gratuitously as if it have been an inscrutable divine dispensation, offered Candice and me--I will retain her pseudonym though not mine--the opportunity of studying in Paris, having revealed which I can finally say categorically that my experience at Kings and in New York, rich as it had been in many ways, was but a stepping stone to the next stage in my autobiography, a sequence as momentous as that it is death which is the next and only stage beyond life.

Our finicky flight companion complained about the shellfish and the whole crew was all over him begging forgiveness

After the vicissitudes of my life in The Republic and the obessions I lived with in New York, the trip to Europe, although consistent with the instabilities that characterized my past, was more like a welcome break with it, and I looked forward to it with anticipation and delight. New York was ersatz Europe and I was going to meet the real thing. I knew I was going to encounter some strangeness, possibly even adaptation problems, but whatever the future held I felt more than up to it.

      The newness of the experience commenced on the flight to Lisbon when the fellow sitting across the aisle from me made such a fuss because the menu they were offering him consisted of shellfish and then more fish all the attendants were all over him asking forgiveness and he stood his ground and demanded to see the captain, who, however, was so busy calculating the heading to a fuel stop on a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic--called Isola da Sal, and not on any map I have ever consulted (maybe because that's not its name but the one I remember)--that he sent the copilot instead.

      Our finicky flight companion was a nattily dressed Italian. In those times suit and tie were de rigueur even on very long trips, unlike today when people do not board airplanes in underwear only because they cannot wear them in the airports, Anyhow, our neighbor was finally pacified with paté for starters, but I was speechless at his sophistication and I ate my ration exactly as they served it. In thinking back on this incident, I have concluded that our neighbor, whom I would no more have dared address than if he was the Pope travelling incognito, for all I knew might have been a shoe salesman on an expense account and squeezing it for all it was worth, but he certainly must have suspected something about in-flight meals, because when the plane landed in Lisbon I had a strong attack of diarrhea which can only have been caused by the shellfish he so adamantly rejected.

      That casual incident foreshadowed the undeniable influences that Europe and especially France would have on my alimentary habits. The changes were at first hardly noticeable--chicken pot pie was the nearest I usually got near stews in New York but coq au vin and bourguignon were in the same general category--but they became unmistakable when I began eating ground raw horse meat, which was standard fare in the self-service restaurant in L'Etoile Candice and I frequented. The purplish pile--horse meat is darker than raw beef--included on top a raw yolk served on the half-shell and I tucked into that stuff on a daily basis for a month and got so fed up with it I have never been tempted by it again.

      At the time, I was astonished (but not disgusted) that I could be eating it and I recalled the poor Amerindians back in The Republic who queued with the buzzards for the offal and intestines outside the slaughterhouses. I had been among some of the tribes on my trips into the scrubby desert I enjoyed so much, and I knew from experience that their cuisine could make even tenderloin smell like something you didn't want to get too close to without a roll of toilet paper, but this only made me all the more adventurous about tasting anything that I came across in France and I was hardly startled when I later learned that Scotsmen ground sheeps' lungs and entrails with oats--I still can't understand how Samuel Johnson could have missed haggis--and served the lot inside a gall bladder or some other intestinal cavity or container. The secret is in the boiling, which makes the stuff taste like gritty mashed Spam, and in the whisky that went with that hash. My Amerindian compatriots went them at least one better because when they wanted to be extremely lavish with an honoured guest they placed a goat's head, eyes and all, in the soup, or maybe they were just natural practical jokers.

At the corner of Raspail and Montparnasse, "Renoir" does sprightly business selling tourists portraits of Balzac emerging from a steambath

Anyway, it was in Paris that I shed my scruples about exotic foods and I went on to eat foul-smelling andouillettes and even raw brains with parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, a Syrian speciality, not bad tasting, which the French improve by serving with what they call "black butter", which is just fried and not really black. The only limits I have not crossed in my culinary adventures are human flesh and something they call balut in the Philippines, which is a duck fetus in various degrees of development, a favorite snack after about 200 beers, especially when crunchy from the incipient beak and claws. The notorious practice of eating live-monkey brain I do not credit because I have met many people from Hong Kong and they seem perfectly normal to me, although I will vouch for depilated cats boiled alive in Canton, but there they also eat their pet Chows as well as anything that walks or crawls.

      Things never went that far in France. Snails, which taste like little rubber balls smothered in oily garlic, and frogs, they can keep, but the tails of crayfish, small crustaceans that looked like scuba-diving insects when I saw them in New Hampshire, went into some of the finest dishes I've ever had. This makes me highly dubious about the common explanation that famines are the reason why people embark on such forays into the seemingly uneatable, for even if crayfish were all they had at hand a famine is a famine and it would take a very large pond teeming with them to feed an extended family of starving peasants for a day or two, and there was always the matter of the white sauce which requires butter and flour and fish stock, and where would peasants in the throes of starvation be getting that?

      Whatever the merits of this famous thesis, for the urgent reason I mentioned, I was not thinking of food or anything else when I flew over the Lisbon countryside. Besides I was so captivated that I could do nothing else but look and look, which is also what I did when the connecting flight took us among cumulus de beau temps--about all I learned from the lecture a talkative Frenchman gave me on flying gyroplanes--and over resplendent Paris and into Orly. I exaggerate only slightly, perhaps not at all, if I say I have never been so happy on arriving anywhere as I did that beautiful summer day in Paris, despite a 36-hour trip during which I might have dozed off a couple of times and feeling as if I had spent a week in a laundry drier at full speed. I mean, it was as if I had arrived where I should have been all my life, as utterly content as I felt when as a child I had been there, which I could only surmise before and now I knew for a fact.

      I was feeling so ebullient I let my talkativeness run far ahead of my ability to speak French, which might have left the impression on some locals that I was a thyroidal dyslexic, starting with the two old ladies that ran the hotel we arrived at. It was in the southwest corner of Raspail and Montparnasse, where a tardy impressionist was churning out painting after identical painting of exactly the same scene, which was mostly hogged by the statue of portly Balzac draped in a bed sheet as if he had just emerged from a steam bath. The tourists were buying them as quickly as he could churn them out, perhaps because he was signing them Renoir.

      Around the corner a tiny restaurant was run by a comic Provençal who carried dozen of dishes in each arm and told the tourists he was a polyglot, which of course he wasn't because he couldn't understand a word I said in the patois I used in trying to converse with him. I must have walked that first week a thousand miles and at the end I was ready for more, and those weeks included white nights that stretched close to midnight, longer than I had ever seen them in New York or anywhere. I remember the weather was hot but also that the porte-cochères were cool and that everything, except the dogshit, which was about the only thing that Paris had in common with Manhattan (but I didn't really mind), was absolutely fine and dandy.

      I came out of that initial euphoria after about a fortnight, and then it wasn't to anything particularly distasteful but to the need of looking for an apartment and registering in La Sorbonne, which I did with surprising ease--save for an encounter with a niggardly Scot who sold me, actually sold me, a tiny stamp I needed for some document and which only cost a couple of ancien francs--and just generally settling down. Of course, my honeymoon with Paris and Frenchmen could not last forever and on various scattered occasions I discovered that everything would not be as smooth and pleasant as it seemed at first.

      To start with, Parisians often snarled, although more commonly they were given to handshakes. They also sometimes would let their hands wander, like the fat pervert who grabbed Candice's thigh even as I thought he was trying to make conversation with me. When I said: "Monsieur!", he answered "Zut! Alors!", and lit a cigarette. Then there was the lady who showed me a small apartment on Foch I knew I couldn't afford, which made me so nervous I tried to shake her hand every time she pointed out something to me. Most embarrassing!

      Courtesy of the Apocrisiary--which is what the Managing Editor had become and the reason I was in Paris; he and my mother were in Brussels--I bought a Dauphine, a tiny French car that could reach 60 mph downhill (if it was steep enough), which got its first bump from a careless driver next to me in front of the National Assembly. I got out and the man gave me a card and left. That made me very suspicious especially after a policeman told me that as I was not bleeding and no one was hurt there was nothing he could do. But I got over my apprehensions when with the little card I did manage to get my little car fixed.

      Except for the tendency to shout salaud in traffic, I got along fine with my fellow Parisians, but the car-to-car insults did leave their scars and when many years later I was driving leisurely along a motorway in Spain and an impertinent Frenchman got on my tail and hit the car horn as hard as he could I was so indignant I chased him--I had a much more powerful car then--all the way to Valencia. I am sure Monsieur Le Claxon never tried that stunt again in his life. But especially my honeymoon did not last, not because of anything the French did, but because I was still the same old neurotic, which was proof that Life-With-Mother in New York, for all my complaining, was not the cause but the exacerbation of the neurosis, but this I probably already knew if only from the memory of my felodese experiment in childhood.

      Married life was, truth be said, only so-so. I missed my whores--a point for Marius--but it was good to have a companion, because after my initial reckless linguistic exuberance I became sensitive to the giggling and the sneers and grew slightly tongue-tied. Besides--point against Marius--my libido was in a state of equilibrium and the longing I did for other pastures was mostly a formal registering of the ancestral male desire to possess as many females as possible, although (again second thoughts) what I really wanted was the satisfaction of my hankering for specific females that occasionally caught my eye, which could be a point for Marañon only I would as soon grant that as have breast implants (a fruitless aversion as they seem to come with aging whether you want them or not).

      The fact is that after all I have lived I am not sure what exactly the male thing is. In the Don Juan story it is having as many women as possible, and this is often taken as a paradigm. For the Apocrisiary it was not so much seduction as the right to extramarital flings, however he got them. For others, it is fucking every day, like eating and excreting, which to me, perhaps because I did not do it, reflected a medical opinion about as enlightened as that masturbation was the cause of belated Down's symptons. Finally, there were those, like Durkheim, who considered monogamy the ideal male condition. This was also approximately Marañon's thesis, which, as its author was an endocrino-psychologist, seemed completely arbitrary. With the same medical background, his disciple Locksmith concluded that the male thing was rape. Apart from a moronic simplification, this was not good collective advice in The Republic, where a considerable part of the male population considered that rape was not an invasion of a woman's privacy but a quick way to her heart.

      Whoever was right on this thoroughly non-essential issue, in my relationship with Candice tiny fissures were starting to appear. She was doing post-grad in the Salpêtrerie, which was admirable, but she was also hinting at having children, which I couldn't give her because of my congenital sterility. As I did not yet know this, her desire was anathema to me and I did not do a good job of masking my feelings. I realize this characteristic of mine is shocking to the general (though not to every one), but I could not help it and I had my reasons, which had to do with my fear that I was not mature enough to be a good parent.

      The ridicule that was often heaped on chain-smoking, coffee-drinking, jittery-as-a-squirrel, rapturous/stupid, ogling new-fathers was dead on target as far as I was concerned and not simply the comic side of the most sublime moment in a person's life. I would never begrudge any one his right to these rituals, but I did not desire for any one either the sad fate that might have been stalking beyond the uterus and I do not think that this attitude necessarily shows a lack of love, but if anything a total dread of it.

Communists felt cheated and adopted a strategy which could be compared to the losing side in the World Cup final shouting: "Let's start again! Let's start again!"  

I think it only fair to the reader that at this point I paused and did some explaning on how the Managing Editor became the Apocrisiary, which I have already summarily mentioned and all I am going to do here is add a few details. After Tyrannos Marcus' downfall and the election to the Presidency of crafty Politico Romulus, The Republic did not instantly become stable, as development economists wanted, because there were a lot of discontented military who thought democracy was a lot of hooey--and who could blame them when the United States, democracy's champion, had given Marcus advice on his uniforms during his entire dictatorial regime?--and they, who also wanted to benefit from America's largesse, were ready to revolt for their ideals. But, as we saw, things had changed in Washington, where development economists had brainwashed Kennedy, and they wanted stability, the sine qua non for their policies, democracy being an added golden bonus, so aspiring coupsters were not going to get any encouragement from ugly Americans. This did not deter many military from getting very belligerent about what they thought of Romulus's croaky speeches.

      To complicate matters, Castro, the son of a Galician immigrant to Cuba who did not like the result of the Spanish-American war, had entered Havana with his Argentine henchman Guevara, who hated America because hoof-and-mouth disease was depressing beef exports from his country. The consensus, accepted world-wide, is that Guevara was a saint. The Vatican has obstinately refused canonisation, or even to receive the abundant claims of miracles performed, but the Cuban communists might have mummified him if the Bolivians who killed him had returned the corpse.

      Anyhow, the two buddies, the Cuban and the Argentine, had only one thing in their mind: to end the sufferings of humanity, for which they started by executing all the members of the previous regime they could lay their hands on. As they were of the torture-the-torturers school of thinking, to keep their squads on their toes they staged occasional mock executions, which mainly exercised the alertness of their blindfolded prisoners. Eventually, craftier-than-thou Castro realized he could not make all of mankind happy and virtuous--he chose to reserve his bounty for Cubans--and he sent Guevara to do it, which was how he got killed.

      Communists in The Republic had had a hand in the overthrow of Tyrannos Marcus and they went along with the move to democracy, but when they saw that Castro, after keeping the world in tenterhooks about his real political intentions, had only been in reformist drag and was a Marxist at heart--although he wasn't, but it's not necessary to subscribe to Marxism in order to be a Marxist--they came to the conclusion that they had been taken in by Romulus and decided to do a Castro on him, which was somewhat as if the losing side in the World Cup final started shouting: "Let's start again! Let's start again!" In sum, they took to the hills and even founded urban terrorist cells, but Romulus was not exactly sucking his thumb.

      To put the insubordinate Military in their place, he told the other military they could wear as many uniforms as Tyrannos Marcus, and what was more important, he also told them to run their own show which was like letting the Pentagon go on an unsupervised contracting binge except that in The Republic the procurement contracts were fictitious. That took care of the uppity military. The rebellious communists were even less of a threat. Those who went guerrilla were mostly afraid of the armed forces and they lived on hand outs from villagers, who understandably were not impressed by the revolution, and those revolutionaries who stayed in the cities confined their activities to kidnapping foreigners who didn't know policemen in The Republic worked on a need-to-pay basis. The only time a terrorist cell went on a rampage and killed a squad of soldiers in the back, the insurrectionary leaders said more or less: "Those guys are not in our group", but Romulus wasn't about to fall for that and he had the lot arrested. They later escaped through a tunnel, were re-arrested, escaped through another tunnel, whereupon some were re-arrested, others laid low, and a truce was called, which was accepted by all but the really really recalcitrant guerrillas, who went into the deep jungle and disappeared (although NG and Discovery have reported occasional sightings).

Politicians were being lent money without strings attached (including having to repay it), which they used to buy St Patrick's Cathedral as a 100% genuine Gothic antique

I am doing a summary here and for a while it was touch-and-go for Romulus, so even though some of his toughies would have liked to tan the Managing Editor's hide for having bought their newspaper at a very low bid, he stayed their hand feeling he had too much in his own two hands already. Besides, the Managing Editor was being totally compliant and he at least knew how to run a newspaper whereas the Politicians didn't have a clue. He retained the well-tested gore-galore formula and he gave the Politicians plenty of space, but this was such child's play that he was bored and asked for and got his embassy.

      In the meantime, The Republic was crawling with development economists. In fact, some of the top people in government were development economists. Strictly speaking, development economics in The Republic was mainly called "import-substitution". This is the way the system worked approximately: a guy with political connections and/or an account in a New York bank (but he had to be a national, at least in the initial phase of developmental policy) went to the government and asked for financing which he obtained and in exchange the government closed the market to competition. Profits were high but were regulated by unlawful agreements through which the entrepreneurs--who normally established banks in which to deposit their takes--lent the Politicians a lot of money without strings attached, including having to repay it. This modality was applied throughout government.

      Another modality (this one preferred by development economists) consisted in prohibiting the import of certain finished products, say, Chevies, upon which General Motors was forced to disassemble assembled cars in Detroit and ship them in pieces to an empty warehouse in The Republic where they were re-assembled and sold at a much higher price than if they had been imported assembled from Detroit. The rationale was that a lot of peasants were being employed. But peasants mostly wanted to be in The Republic's capital where for a time they were being paid more for being unemployed than for working for General Motors. This was the part of The Republic's democratic ways the communists liked and it was so succesful--success was measured by the number of shanties that could be built on a hillside in half a second--that Castro chose it as a model for socialist Cuba, where people say they act as if they were being paid for acting as if they worked. How the system really works I never found out during the two years I lived in Havana, where mostly what I did was play golf. But I am now on an unjustifiable tangent and I want to return to The Republic before turning to the Apocrisiary himself and Brussels.

      Although industrialization based on development economics principles was always a winning political proposition--not by any means to imply it was a succesful one--for a time profits, though proportionately high, were relatively low in absolute terms, but The Republic came into serious money when oil prices shot up and it is simply impossible to exaggerate the consequences. Let me just say that development economics was carried to such giddy heights that in two decades the financial system was bankrupt, Politicians and Military were filthy rich, and entrepreneurs from The Republic were buying such things as Pater Noster Square in London and St.Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue (some one sold it to them as a genuine 100% Gothic antique). Every one knew the system was in crisis when some one laid a turd in the foreign secretary's office and not much afterwards (according to a dubious hypothesis) the doer of the deed was elected President by a landslide and changed the constitution so that he could be re-elected automatically every six years.

      Fortunately for the Apocrisiary, he was not a party to these sorry happenings and he did a good job although it did not escape me that his choice of Belgium had to do with friends he made during his years as a student in Spain, so that his posting must have had not a little to do with bragging. He was like that all of his life: very serious about things that ultimately he used for the most unserious purposes. I will only be anticipating a little by saying that I am even worse than he ever was and that I have never taken anything seriously, but this travesty of living has also hindered me from achieving anything much beyond the illuminations contained in this work, which Dear Reader will be able to judge by him/herself in due time.

      I knew, then, that the Apocrisiary was in Brussels to show off, and I was obviously curious about whom he was showing off to and maybe even why, so when he and my mother decided that they were willing to forgive Candice and invited us to visit them at Brussels I accepted and Candice was not about to object. He was living in a tidy quiet street, which is like saying again that he lived in Brussels, and all I can remember is that the street was named after a modern painter, very famous also in Brussels. The house, though narrow, was comfortable and cozy, like Brussels.

      Shortly after we arrived in the middle of August and were unceremoniously received by His Excellency and Madame, we were bundled into a car and taken to a beach resort called Le Zoute, also improbably known as Knokke, where I, who was dressed for the hot Paris summer, almost freezed to death. Some beach resort, I thought! Shortly after that I met the object of the Apocrisiary's strutting, or I think I did, because first I met a very stiff, roly-poly Belgian, but he sold phonographs--I was forced to buy one from him I didn't particularly like--and this didn't seem to make sense, but later I met his wife, who reminded me of the Parisian woman whose hand I wanted to keep shaking, and I presume it was this woman that he wanted to impress, perhaps because she impressed him when he was a boina-wearing pseudo-Spaniard and as far as I could tell highly impressionable.

Bernie Ranger explains to me that Knokke and Le Zoute were the same place, for which later he suffers from an acute case of heterotopia

On my mother's invitation, I visited Belgium various times, especially when the Apocrisiary was not there. Where the Apocrisiary went on those occasions, I do not know, but years later I met a general--improbably being tried for one of those fake procurement contracts--who told me my father used to maintain a household with a different woman in a rather out of the way place in The Republic. At first I had my doubts, but I wouldn't put it past him.

      In Brussels I also saw Bernie Ranger. I have not mentioned him before, but it was he who introduced me to the diary of Amiel, the Genevois masturbator, because he himself was writing a thesis on Sénancour, which also had to do with and required knowing a great deal about Sartre. Unamuno, incidentally, was a pre-existentialist Spanish philosopher who wrote a novel about a character who kills himself because he is afraid of dying

      Ranger was a very cultivated man. Now that I think about it, it was he also who explained to me that Le Zoute and Knokke were the same place, but that there were some "idiots" in northern Belgium who pronounced Le Zoute as Knokke. These "idiots", I learned on a trip to Brugès (actually Brugge), were the Flamands or Flemish, whom Ranger, for some reason, hated. They spoke Dutch but the Dutch also hated them and made stupid jokes about flying upside down over Belgium so as not to see the mess below.

      Belgians as a rule are not the most beloved people on Earth, but I have nothing against them. In any event, they could say that they got the best of Bernie Ranger, who returned to The Republic, married a museum, and, like my other friend the dypsomaniac surrealist poet, killed himself because of a really bad case of heterotopia. If I have not gone their way, it is because, in a most forthright, but also in a most curious way, I cut all ties to The Republic over a decade and a half ago. I must also explain that Ranger did not marry a museum: a museum was named after his wife when she donated a collection of kinetic art (large optical illusions) to The Republic's Ministry of Museums, which puts her in the same category as Monsieur Le Louvre and Mr.MOMA (who at least had the modesty to use only his initials).

      Be all that as it may, Paris was my base and not Brussels and in Paris I rented an apartment, although it was not in Paris proper but in Neuilly, in an art-deco building on a street called Boulevard D'Inkermann, which either never existed or is never visited by any one, because no one, aside from myself, seems to know it. This may be because Neuilly is as exciting as Nettown Common, near which I also lived, and even in my mind, except for the neo-Romanesque church where Bossuet preached, the place is something of a blur.

      The apartment we lived in was at the back of the last floor. The furniture was totally délabré (I have never seen anything as délabré in my life) but there was a painting by Greuze (about an old man on his death-bed surrounded by grief-stricken oglers) and it had a tiny balcony which gave on some backyards where Bonnard painted. In the distance I could see the towers of Sacré Coeur, which I never admired but which at that remove I could for some unlikely reason call "la tour babylonée". The owner of the apartment was an old Vichyite army captain called Perruquier who had a small gallery near Saint Germain. My relations with him at first friendly later soured in part because of the concièrge, who expected more on Christmas from me than the pack of Gauloises I gave her.

      I said before that I was the same old neurotic, but this is inaccurate: I was still neurotic but in different ways. For one thing, I went into a religious phase I can only vaguely explain, for it was not due to anything specific like Bossuet's sermons, which I read carefully until about the middle of each second line before falling asleep, and so it must have been an ambient contagion from the aesthetics of religion, like feeling as if I was in a jewel box on a visit to La Sainte Chapelle. This was a magical moment in the sense I have frequently experienced of not being repeatable. The first time I visited Chartres my legs went wobbly, though not the second time, and the second time I went to La Sainte Chapelle it seemed more dusty than sublime, even though I was in an I-really-mean-it-this-time religious phase. This is true of other experiences throughout my life, including Paris during this period--the first visit in my childhood was just idealization--for I have returned there many times and it is not the uncrowded, unfrantic place I knew then, although admittedly I lived there which I have not done since.

      In part it is difficult to be precise about my Parisian religious phase because it did not have any antecedents in Kings, notwithstanding Augustine, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and other God-fanatics I read, and also because it was accompanied by extremely reactionary views, which I remember sketchily--I tore up my notebooks from the time--and I do not think I truly espoused. What I mean is I might have been telling myself: "You're a Catholic again and if you're a Catholic you have be as politically unenlightened as possible", and this was like imposing impossible conditions on myself. There was a limit to how far I would go in considering jobs at the Renault assembly line hereditary and literacy among peasants superfluous and I must have known that eventually my initial enthusiasm for such quaint views would flag.

      If I had to illustrate my spiritual mood then I could say that I was moved by Le journal d'un curé de campagne, a work which upon re-visiting I have found as exotic as the kuru-prone brain-eaters of New Guinea. It is possible that in Kings I had an inkling of my susceptibility to Medievalism and Ultramontanism when I read about the psychological benefits to be had from belonging to a society in which every one knew his place in life, like the one that supposedly prevailed in feudal Western Europe. This point of view which elicited smirks from a Colombian fellow student to whom I expounded it--Colombians, in my experience, can be very superficial (witness Garcia Marquez' colloid-thin plots and characters)--and I myself found it somewhat speculative, for I was obviously not unaware of the squalorish conditions of life in the Middle Ages, although, given the instabilities and other accidents of my life, there were good reasons also why I would have been inclined to embrace it.

Why I would prefer being run over by a jeepney full of laughing and singing Filipinos than have to be taking strong laxatives

On the matter of personal religious faith, I have come to believe that it comes and goes, like the economic waves that Kondatrieff, a numerologist, invented, and his otherwise sane disciple, Braudel, accepted. If I further needed an analogy to my religious-cycles theory, there was the priest I met on a ship who once a year went on a cruise dressed like an ordinary tourist and even whirled the ladies around the ballroom floor but donned his clerical garb upon arriving back in New York. I knew he was a priest because the pursar, a Spaniard of the old school, could not refer to him without spluttering and spitting--which is the reason I engaged the momentarily defrocked priest in conversation--so it did not surprise me when I saw him with his white collar on, but he believed I was astounded and I was too kind to go and disabuse him. The point is that like the dancing priest, but the other way around, I have been an unbeliever most of my life with occasional reversions to faith.

      My first bout of religious intensity was in Miami, as I have recounted. Then came the fateful confessional incident, in which I refused to wear a scarlet letter and became mildly attitudinous about religion. Then about ten years elapsed before my Parisian return to the Catholic flock which was succeeded by my habitual indifference, until various decades later I went back to God in despair, and this time I really tried to believe, but as I found Him hard of hearing, which was perfectly understandable--it would have been perplexing if it had been any other way--I gradually slipped back into indifference with the proviso that I know whom to thank if anything good happens to me, but this, I don't believe, is anybody's paradigm of faith.

      So, religion being for me like the stock market and the price of wheat, in the end I will probably face death very likely in an indifference-stretch of the religion-cycle--duration-wise, indifference in me beats belief by a large multiple--possibly thinking about one of The Republic's cathouses, though maybe not. The unlikeliest possibility is that I will be listening to some much-loved composition by a favourite composer, and the complete impossibility is that, should I be given a precise prognosis by some quack--a contradictory proposition anybody can see through--I will be awaiting death surrounded by cheery companions acting as if dying, being in the order of things, should be considered like bowel movements, which I know in the highly unlikely correct-prognosis scenario I would be managing only with the aid of strong laxatives. I would immeasurably prefer being run over and killed instantly by a jeepney full of laughing and singing filipinos. But I doubt that anything I wished about my death will be fulfilled, mainly because I do not wish anything at all.

      Aside from the out-of-the-ordinary religiosity, which was only mildly neurotic, Paris was, like New York and anywhere else, mostly routine, and this is what I meant about things having changed little in my life and in particular not my death-obsession or my melancholy moods relieved only by bouts of uncontrollable, seemingly unmotivated enthusiasm. From a tourist's point of view, however, my routine could have seemed enviable. I would drive my little Dauphine from D'Inkermann to Place Neuilly and from there, along a street parallel to the Grande Armée, I would reach L'Etoile and drive down to La Concorde (passing along the way the Grand and the Petit Palais and views to La Tour Eiffel). In La Concorde I would naturally see the Crillon and the Department of the Navy with the Madeleine in a dead-on-center recess between them and then cross the bridge to the National Assembly intersection, which was where my little vehicle got smacked, and from there, after avoiding a million salauds, I would engage St. Germain until St Michel--Boul'Mich if you're a really sophisticated American tourist--where I turned right until I turned left to the Panthéon, and then spent the next hour or so in a real maze of streets looking for a place to park.

      If the routine involved driving Candice to the hospital, I am sure I must have taken Rue de Rivoli (or else Haussmann to the Opéra) and from there through a warren of streets eventually emerging on the Places de la République and la Nation and thereabouts somewhere east I would eventually drop her off. I know I could reconstruct my habitual trajectories, but then any body could do the same thing with a map of Paris, so basically what I am trying to do is give an impression of monotony within the splendours of a magnificent city, having done which I will only add that, as in New York, I spent a lot of time in extra-curricular educational activities engaged in, as well as the more formal studies, with special keenness for reasons I will shortly explain. But before, I want to relate what was perhaps my most memorable cultural experience in Paris and that was when I met Sartre, the great Sartre himself, in the very flesh, enveloped by a very crumpled dirty-looking suit and a soiled shirt and loose tie.

Old Snort the Surrealist poet curses Chump a struggling Chinese painter and I get to meet Sartre in the flesh

As it happened, Snort was also living in Paris. Snort was a particularly touchy Surrealist poet--he had a chip on his shoulder from having once tried to eat artichokes with a knife and fork in public--and when he got stinking drunk he would call people yellow-shit eaters and stuff like that. Well, old Snort one night invited me out to a Latin Quarter bistro where the feature attraction was the then struggling painter Soot. It was he who later became famous with his gigantic optical illusions, some of which Bernie Ranger's wife used to form the museum she named after herself, but in Paris then he was making ends meet by strumming the guitar and singing folk ballads about bony fishes and horny plainsmen.

      Normally I would have kept out of Snort's way but he could be charming when he was sober, so I accepted his invitation and when we entered the bistro and he went to greet Chump, a struggling Chinese painter he knew, I sat there drinking plonk with another struggling painter I didn't know very well, until, after maybe half and hour of Soot's monotonous strumming--most every body there was very laid back in very post-existentialist dark poses--I heard Snort start cursing Chump and I thought it was time I made my exit.

I was walking along the darker streets of La Rive Gauche and getting somewhat disoriented, so when I suddenly thought I wanted to get home quickly I decided to ask directions from a man who had just finished peeing on a low "Deffense d'afficher" stencil on the wall of a building from the time of Abelard, and this man to my total and amazed absolute incredulity I recognized immediately as Sartre.

Now, I have come across some famous people that way--I bumped into the human bulk of Peter Ustinov during the intermission of a performance of Brecht's Galileo in the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in Lincoln Center and I passed by the shadow of Maggie Smith as it emerged from the Brompton Oratorio--but this was Sartre--my God, Sartre, as in Jean-Paul!--and there was no way I was going to remain poised and aloof when he heard me asking how to reach the first métro station and he was about to enter a Gallic shrug routine, so I practically shouted: "Vous êtes Sartre, n'est-ce pas?", and he answered something to the effect that: "Yes, the last time I looked in the mirror". His answer was somewhat petulant and I was almost about to blurt out: "Through which eye?", but I remembered my own quiver and I did not want him to scamper away, so I again shouted something like: "Nihilation", and my interlocutor this time did look startled and shot back: "Temoignage". That word, meaning "witnessing", was, as every true Sartrean knew, what the moral conscience was about. Now, Sartre might have meant: "Have a heart. It's late and I want to go to Simone", but this I was not disposed to let happen. Unfortunately, I could only come up with the shocker: "Êtes-vous homosexuel?" I know I did not use any offensive word like tapette, but I did not see Sartre smile.

      Many years later I tried the same trick with John Updike and asked him if he was Rabbit and I got the same cool response. Nevertheless, Sartre did not move and I figured it was up to me to make another conversational gambit. This time I did overdo it because I asked him if he truly believed in nihilation, which after all was how I had launched our substantial philosophical discussion, and Sartre spoke very quickly and I only caught what sounded like that he wished I was nihilated but that he was not going to stand there and be a witness, which I could understand because his pet hatreds were flics and pantoufles. As I saw him retreat into the night, I was chagrined with regret and disillusionment, because I had not even had time to broach the mighty question of neurosis, but I got over that when Sartre not much later published a huge tome on psychoanalysis, which upon perusal turned out to be about the tricks patrons used, like getting up very early in the morning, to feel good about exploiting their ouvriers.

      No matter that our encounter was brief, I had managed to elicit a few words from the French GMH and one of those happened to be a password, so I could congratulate myself on having received a kind of accolade. As gradually I came to understand that with Sartre you either believed what he said because he said it or you did not believe it, my enthusiasm for his works waned and I never got around to reading his memoirs and the thousand or so volumes of his collected articles. In fact, even now I cannot explain how I could have been so Sartrean in the midst of a so-called religious phase and I can only presume that the common denominator must have been some kind of moral axiom about respecting human life and not spitting on people's graves. The latter referred to an alternative French ethical doctrine I had read about--its original inspiration was J.-F. Céline, an embittered novelist whose hobby was desecrating synagogues--but did not feel inclined to accept. In sum, even though French intellectuals have a not-so-rationalistic partiality for psychoanalysis--Lacan, for instance, later achieved the unimaginable feat of making Freud more incomprehensible than he is--I did not make much progress in France in my own task of understanding neurosis, but I did make progress in two other areas: my knowledge of Europe and my formal studies.

My carefully laid plans in La Sorbonne are almost baulked when I discover my Kings BA is worthless because I was married when I got it

Nowadays when it is not uncommon for floor-cleaners in very large and powerful corporations to let drop things in the order of: "I am planning to spend my summer meditating in Ladakh", to speak of Continental tournées is a bit like being shocked about pre-marital sex, so I will not bother the reader with details and simply allude to the time a bell-clanging flock of sheep awoke me in the center of Arles early one morning and the time an Austrian tried to bum one of my precious Petit Upmanns off me and I turned him down flat, which is merely to show how long ago it was I did my early travelling in Europe.

      It was so long ago, a trip from Brussels to Paris by express train took three hours, long enough as I observed for a normal Frenchman to down a bottle of Riesling without loosening his impeccable Prince of Wales knot, but barely one hour less than the same trajectory in my lowly Dauphine, with the throttle through the floor of course. In mentioning these incidents, I am being unfair to others equally deserving, such as the religious madman who in Santiago de Compostela kept disrupting a New Years Eve mass whenever the priest said something out loud in Latin--it wasn't funny but I couldn't help thinking of Le journal d'un curé de Campagne and the New Guinean cannibals--or the guide who ticked me off in no uncertain terms for daring to say that Gothic style had not originated in Spain, about the equal of the Spanish expert who considered that the Gothic arch had relly been invented by the Goths.

      My appreciation of art during this time grew exponentially in relation to my Kings years, although in honesty it wouldn't have been possible without the New York museums. Also, I used Gombrich's Story of Art, which I mention because many years later his son was my first guide to Theravada Buddhism. Of my vast experience in tramping endlessly but profitably through countless galleries in every corner of Western Europe, I will only mention that my torture-the-torturers thing received its most devastating blow when I saw, the time of my visit to Brugge with Bernie Ranger, the Gerard David painting of the judgement of Cambyses, in which three executioners are going about their business of flaying a man alive as if they were basket-weaving. I didn't know then who Cambyses was, but I was appalled by the sentences he applied. When I discovered later that what the object of his ire had done was to execute a faked mortgage, I knew that Gerard David had to be joking or he had a sadistic streak the size of a motorway. My hatred of torturers continued unabated and all I can do now is put it out of my mind, on which I have some practice from the actual state of my unfriendly relations with death.

      My formal education deserves more attention for various reasons. One is that I lied--please consider that these lies I admit to are very minor--when I said that registering in La Sorbonne was easy. I meant registering in itself was easy--except for meeting the penny-pinching Scotsman--but getting the recognition I expected for my higher education studies was not only difficult but in fact impossible, and it was in La Sorbonne that I first learned how absolutely useless my Kings education would be in carrying me very far in the academic world or in life.

      As I said, in New York I longed for Europe and when I got to Europe I was not disappointed, and as I knew the Apocrisiary's bent towards the inscrutable and the unpredictable, especially where I was involved, I was determined not to let him pull the rug from under my feet again. I was desperate to get ahead in the University of Paris and that meant going straightaway for a licence, which sounded, and in fact was, much more substantial than Bachelor of Arts, especially as the "bachelor" part in ordinary English means nothing whatever--wasn't I married when I got my diploma?--and in French, whence it derives, it means "bachelier", and that is nothing but a high school graduate and after Sputnik every one knew that American high schools were where girls went to become cheer leaders and boys to dress up like hotel doormen and play in fancy-stepping marching bands.

      I was going naturally for a license ès lettres and for that I needed, besides the certificat of secondary education, at least four more certificats in literature and philology and in the normal course of things students did only one certificat per year, which was about all I, with my still insecure command of French, could aspire to. I don't know exactly what I expected but it certainly wasn't the certificat of secondary education and a certificat of English literature I got and this drove me to such extremes that I badgered a visiting American professor to see if I could excite his nationalist feelings, with what results you can easily imagine. Boiler, the guy who showed me the door of his class at the LSE, in comparison was Emily Post, or whoever now is writing etiquette manuals not relative to golf.

      In view of this dilemma, I chose the sneakiest strategy available and that was to register for a certificat in Spanish literature, which I knew schematically from the chrestomaties I had read back in The Republic, with a view to doing Spanish philology the following academic year, by which time I would have been speaking French like Corneille and would waltz through a certificat of French literature with a certificat in French philology to spare and a sure licence ès lettres under my belt, and let the Apocrisiary do anything against that! It is easy to remark here that my attitude to studies in Paris was vastly different from what it had been at Kings, where what I wanted was to exorcise my inner demons, and it could even be said that in La Sorbonne neurosis as a life experience, except for my problems with Candice, was definitely taking a back seat.

My French academic career culminates with a resounding mention très bien and Cesar Cornerio makes me feel like the Daughter-in-Law Elect

The catch in this plan, as I soon discovered, was that I thought of myself as already a middling expert on Spanish literature and when I attended my first classes on the subject--the first one was on Quevedo, a picaresque author who hated arrivistes at the Spanish court, an easy target in the class-conscious society he lived in, which is why he mostly fawned on grandees who would have had him flogged if he dared mess with them--I discovered that the professors and the students spoke perfect Castilian, much better than my own Spanish, at least in terms of diction, and I realized my chosen subject was not going to be a cinch course, like astronomy at Kings. Well, I wasn't about to be fazed by such details and I began to read the parts in Spanish literature I had missed in the chrestomaties and since my reading skills had been honed over the years and I had a good memory and I reasoned quite brilliantly, I not only managed to overcome my dazzlement over the fluency of the Frenchies around me but also started to feel very confident in my work.

      I felt especially proud in having mastered the complexities surrounding the origins of Spanish lyric poetry--did it derive from the French troubadour tradition or from Arabic stanza-forms by way of Galician-Portuguese practitioners?--and I also read the masterpieces of the Generation of 98, some of whom I hadn't even heard mention before. As papers on these and other subjects were accepted in Spanish, I had no problems in expressing myself--though I kept very quiet in class for fear of having my phonetic solecisms exposed--and I was getting the excellent grades I had been accustomed to in The Mount.

      In part, my admirable performance was due to the ease with which I assimilated the French method of explication de texte, which consisted in taking every sentence in any given work and shaking it down as thoroughly as the bandits had Barry Lyndon on his first excursion into the real world, so that in later years I was somewhat puzzled by the prestige gained by Barthès and the deconstructivists and the structuralists and the other "ists" who basically were only doing what my unsung Spanish literature teachers did during my time at La Sorbonne. I also understood how entire treatises on Ancient Athens could be constructed on such momentous subjects as fishcakes and whores. The secret was explication de texte taken to monotonous and repetitive lengths occcasionally punctuated by such bright deductions as that the Greeks of old liked extra-marital sex but did not appreciate their wives engaging in it, which might have led one to think that was the way Western Civilization got started.

      I was, then, fairly confident when the finals approached but I was not foreseeing what actually happened. Examinations, both oral and written, were in Spanish and one got to choose a subject out a choice of three. Among the choices I had was none other than my old friend Don Quijote and that was like telling English football hooligans they could lynch the other side in a match Manchester United lost through an arbiter's bad call. In fairness, it also works the other way around, but Don Quijote did not choose me, I spotted him, and I went at him, both in writing and viva voce, as if it was me and not Auerbach who had discovered Cervantes' secret, which was, as you will recall, that Don Quijote was insane so that his creator could get away with jostling grandees without getting head bumps or worse (although in point of historical fact he did get his ribs maltreated one night in Valladolid, whcih means his ruse was not that succesful).  

      My erudition so impressed my examiners that they gave me a mention très bien, which was about the equivalent of the Super Grand Maître of the Légion d'Honneur, and in my class that year I was the only recipient of such exalted recognition despite the prowesses of my fellow students in speaking impeccable Castilian. I had made it! My compatriot Cornerio, the free-association poet and future suicidal dipsomaniac, was so impressed that on the occasions we met again he could only exclaim: "He got a mention très bien, my God!", implying that every one around me should bow, which made me feel like the Daughter-in-law-Elect, but I must admit I was pretty proud myself and corrected him the time by inadvertence he said it was only a mention bien.

      To celebrate my stupendous academic achievement, I did a tour of the Camargue and Provence, where I gorged on crayfish tails and the only discordant note was that Candice caught me talking up a French bonbon in a bikini on a beach near Saintes-Maries-des-Mers. Upon my return to Paris, however, I got the untoward news that the Apocrisiary, despite having been duly apprized of my triumph, had decided that I should abandon my European plans and get ready to march off to the Uptown University School of Journalism. I do not have the imagination to invent a higher form of perversity that that. It was to put it mildly as if Chicken Little had really had a piece of the sky fall on him, except I could not convince the Apocrisiary of the impending disaster. I thought of bolting, but I had no savings to speak of and, what was worse, neurosis, which had been dormant, suddenly sprang to life like a Hydra saying from each of its unprepossessing heads that I had no choice but to obey. Candice did not take the news well either and when I explained that I had to acquiesce our relations took a bad tumble.

      I suspected that nothing good was going to happen where I was destined to go and my premonitions were confirmed during the interview with some hack the School of Journalism used in Paris to interview prospective students. He spoke in awed tones of his Alma Mater and I looked bored and depressed and answered the stupid questions he asked with the lack of enthusiasm a dog might have shown if it had been served a heaping bowl of salade niçoise. Europe had suddenly become for me like the shelves at Fauchon for a hungry gourmet with a few sous in his pocket. Frankly, I despaired and in my despair I assumed a the-hell-with-it attitude.

Back in New York again, I am greeted by the Taxiarch with an "I told you so", although I couldn't remember what it was he had told me

I still had my trusty Dauphine, which took on the appearance of a Peugeot 505 about to be repossessed, and I still had some francs in my Credit Lyonnais bank account. I decided I would spend the time I had left in Europe travelling as fast as I could every where I could. I did Spain like a whirlwind. In Madrid I insulted a cop who stopped me for not respecting the right of way of pedestrians about a kilometer away on the Plaza de la Cibeles at midnight. I got away with that by claiming diplomatic immunity, but basically I think the guy just let me go because he did not want to shoot me and possibly get into a lot of trouble. In Toledo I almost ran over a guy who wouldn't get out of the way after I called him a strabic imbecile. Sorry, old chap!

      There were no motorways then and I would take curves at 100 mph--the roads were two-lane and followed the contours of hills, down which I gunned my little engine as if I wanted to melt it--and Candice became so scared that, after I drove in one day from Barcelona to Paris smoking Gitanes all the way, she left for The Republic. After that I did Italy with a blond friend who appreciated a free ride. I was panting after her, but she knew I was married and did not want to put out. At least she accompanied me to restaurants where I ate all the asterisks the Michelin Guide recommended and downed at least one bottle of wine at each sitting. In Rome we went to a discothèque (an early one) where I felt the way Marcello Mastroianni did in La dolce vita when the fishermen pulled out of the Tyrrhenian Sea an ugly looking cross between a Manta ray and an elephant's liver. This is not to say that I was not also imbibing the culture, but this was tantamount to a cancer-ward patient reading about promising experiments on laboratory rats.

      Towards the end I was reduced to wooing Spanish cleaning women and prowling Saint Germain at night on the off-chance of meeting Gênet and having a homosexual affair. When I embarked on the America at Le Havre I think I was the unhappiest passenger that ever set out across the Atlantic, except maybe a chicken-shit Viking in Leif Erickson's crew. I had a stateroom with no portholes--possibly in steerage for all I remember, or care to--and I sat by myself in the dining room where the only person I talked with during the voyage was an Irish harbour pilot in Cork who spoke in brogue and what I did was nod to his incomprehensible chattering, which is ironic because I had had the same experience on arriving in France with the loquacious gyroplane pilot.

      Back in New York, I stayed at the Taxiarch's apartment. His greeting was something like: "I told you so", although I couldn't remember what it was he had told me. Maybe I just read that into whatever it was he did say and I was only reproaching myself, because I had finally understood that my trip to Europe and my academic plans had only been a charade and that my fate all along had been to return to The Republic, a prospect in which I no longer even contemplated the possibility of law studies and a life of my own. I was wrong about the latter part of that dark premonition, as I would soon see.

      To be admitted to the Uptown University School of Journalism was for a vocational journalist the equivalent of the marriage proposal Diane got from Prince Charles, but to me it felt like the aftermath of their subsequent marriage. Besides, I knew right away I was out of place there--the Parisian hack must have returned a bad report on me--because admittance was usually limited to eighty students and that year there were eighty-one of us. My feelings of alienation grew apace when I saw that, as usual, students from developing countries were trying to gain points by acting like clowns for their American counterparts. They employed the usual methods of abasement which consisted in making like ingenués in heavily accented English, like: "Wow, you buy The New York Times Sunday edition on Saturday!" The instructors didn't impress me much either. There was a lanky, horse-faced individual who made it a point of explaining he was from Bronx, not The Bronx, which he considered demeaning because nobody said The Manhattan or The Staten Island. That one really stumped me. There were also lots of guest lecturers from the active profession. A smart-alec plump woman spoke with a flip New York accent about reviewing films--as if she had been with me surrounded by the juveniles beating off over Hedy Lamarr--and a squat fellow, who looked like a green grocer, droned on for hours about how to poll the public. The hit of the season I spent there was Averell Harriman (his real name was William, which he found vulgar), a liberal multi-millionaire who liked to sound cranky.

      The students were given actual news-covering assignments and were afterwards encouraged to tell about their experiences, as interesting to me as if they were recounting their subway trips. One of them related with evident pride how he had managed to cross a police line the time two passenger planes collided and fell on Queens.

      As to me I was ordered to cover Castro, who was in the UN denouncing Yankees right and left--little knowing or caring whether Baked Beans were paying attention--and when I couldn't get the interview I requested via Western Union, with which I was hoping to make a splash or at least be graduated on the spot, they told me I should have interviewed the doorman at the Cuban legation, which didn't make much sense, but then I wasn't in the spirit of the game.

      The final straw was when they sent me to cover some small-claims court case--imagine doing that to a mention très bien like me!--which was over when I got there, so that when I called the copy-editor who was supposed to type my story I harked back to the arithmetic battle in third grade and after a silence over the phone I finally uttered: "Um...er", and that's exactly what I got back on an otherwise blank sheet of paper when I returned to the school next day. Not much of a story, really!

      By then I had prepared a letter to the Apocrisiary in which I told him what I thought of the school of journalism and his plans for me, just prior to the school telling me what they thought of me, namely, that if I was a journalist, they were running a dog shelter.

      I will admit I did learn a lot from School of Journalism, but mostly stuff I could have figured out for myself, such as correcting grammatical errors and writing snappy headlines, and when I finally got back to The Republic, where they weren't too good at such tasks, as I had no viable profession I had no choice but to get work as a journalist in some third-rate rag out in the sticks.

Candice and I made up our differences and as she was again at work applying what she had learned at La Salpetrerie, she had the good heart to help me out while I worked myself out of the mire I had fallen into. The World was a more powerful adversary than the Apocrisiary could ever be, but I knew that the Apocrisiary was a persistent, personal foe, whereas the World was just out there, very strong, but also self-complacent and not prepared for the sort of hit-and-run tactics I knew so well. I also knew I wasn't going to win any wars but I figured I could win a few battles, enough to consolidate a piece of ground of my own and stave off any future attempts by the Apocrisiary to subject me.