Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

  Meanwhile, I'm enjoying a unique position, a job shared by no living soul on this planet. Assuming that you've got at least a peapod of curiosity about it, I'll scribble on.

  Up until several years ago, the Vatican maintained four branches of military or police (four known branches, that is: don't forget the undercover Felicitators). Three of these corps, the Palatine Guard, the Noble Guard and the Gendarmery were flat out law-and-order bad asses. They protected the security of the Holy See with rifles, revolvers, cannon, machine guns and other tools of the trade. If an appreciable number of Catholics saw anything incongruous about a religious mission bristling with weapons, they pretended that cannon were canon and didn't let on. Until just recently. Then, all of a sudden, the implications of holy police were being discussed so widely that the Pope, to head off further dissent, was forced to make his most drastic reform to date. With a well-timed sweep of his ringed fingers, he disbanded the Palatine Guard, Noble Guard and Gendarmery.

  In so doing, he increased the power and presence of the Felicitate Society. Whereas once we were mainly trouble-shooters abroad, we now swarm in the shadow of the golden throne itself. The smiling jerk who mixes your chocolate sundae in the Vatican soda shoppe may be a master of poisons, the same 007 who slipped Adlai Stevenson his London heart attack pill. The enthralled tourist you see grinding his movie camera at the Gate of Saint Anne may be photographing potential troublemakers for closed circuit TV. I write “may” because I myself don't really know.

  All I know is my own job here, and my job is involved with that military corps that the Pope did not dissolve—the ancient and colorful Swiss Guard. The fifty-six dudes in the Swiss Guard strut around in pantaloons and leggings of blue, red and yellow; silver breastplates and medieval helmets. They are armed only with fifteenth-century halberds, which are long pole-like weapons with ax blades and spiked points. As you must have gathered, they are mainly a showpiece. Or they were. Since all other papal soldiers have been fired, and since the Felicitate Society, however strong its presence, must work in secrecy—not only from the public but from most Vaticanians as well—the burden of defending Vatican City has fallen hard on the fancy shoulders of these overgrown Swiss choirboys.

  Now, with dissension so rampant within the Church today, and with outside opposition stronger than it has been in decades, the Pope and his pals are theoretically in unusual danger. (On a visit to Asia last year, the Pope required a security force twelve thousand strong and even then he was almost assassinated in Manila.) The threat of demonstrations of one sort or another is constant. So, it is conceivable that the Swiss Guard will be seeing action soon, even if that action consists only of clearing St. Peter's Square of sit-in protesters. Imagine how messy it would look in the press—and in the eyes of pilgrims and tourists—if these favorite picturesque toy soldiers are forced to go hacking and stabbing with their almost comical Renaissance halberds. It would seem especially nasty if the victims of the poleaxes were nonviolent demonstrators. How much cleaner and quieter it would be if, with a few quick, almost unobtrusive hand motions a Swiss Guardsman could snap a spine or shut tight a throat. Maintain the old decorum with a minimum of blood and fuss. It is toward that end that the Swiss Guard is learning karate. Yours truly is its honorable mentor.

  I live in a cell just off the karate training room two levels down in the restricted catacombs. I'm adjacent to the College of Cardinals' private rifle range and directly below the VIP cafeteria where Gurdjieff once shared a pizza with Mary Baker Eddy. Below me, the third-level catacombs are really top secret, but as an agent of Felicitate I have pretty much the run of the place. I can get into areas where even the Swiss Guard is not allowed. While trying not to arouse suspicions, I have been poking around in the various bedrock chambers down here at every opportunity. Following are listed some of my more interesting discoveries.

  1. Erotic Art. Naturally, I list this first. Drool, drool. There are stacks and stacks of paintings and squads of sculptures salted away down here. Many are in exile from public perception merely because they depict men and women in their birthday suits, but some have come by their banishment more deservingly. There is a magnificent Rembrandt, for example, that portrays a couple balling in a hay field. I sneeze and scratch with vicarious pleasure just to glance at it.

  2. Dead Sea Scrolls. As I understand it, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were unearthed in the late forties and early fifties, some were purchased by Hebrew University, others by the archbishop of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem. The archbishop (a Catholic, natch) later sold his scrolls to Hebrew University (does Hebe U. have a football team or aren't they allowed to play with pigskin?), but evidently not before culling those which might contradict traditional religious beliefs or embarrass Catholic dogma. Moreover, some of the Hebrew U. scrolls were processed at the Vatican Library, where additional editing might have taken place. Hidden in the catacombs, along with other old manuscripts and documents that for one reason or another must be too dangerous for inclusion in the 500,000-volume Vatican Library, are Dead Sea fragments whose contents are a mystery to all but a powerful few. These mysterious documents are guarded day and night by a quartet of blind nuns who know them only by touch.

  3. Pharmaceutical Taboos. Since Catholic missionaries often were the first white men to have contact with primitive cultures, particularly in Africa and the New World, they were in an excellent position to examine—unhampered by scientific proponents of free inquiry—the folk medicines and drug sacraments employed by various tribes. In the process, they concealed a great deal of pharmaceutical information, and were able in some cases to scare the natives into abandoning use of natural drugs. I have found in the catacomb drug room, samples of peyote, yajé and psilocybic mushrooms along with documents dating from 1510 describing their “demonic” effects, plus countless jars of other blacklisted botanical materials containing God knows what lightning-flavored molecules offering God-knows what incredible insights and flashes, oh baby, my mind sputters to consider it. Also locked up in the chamber of pharmacological subversives are native contraception potions, any or all of which might be safer and more effective than the Pill. Medical science knows nothing of them. Guess why they were suppressed.

  4. Easter Island Plaques. When the first white explorers landed on Easter Island, each of the giant stone heads there had at its base an inscribed plaque that presumably explained the significance of the statue. It is widely documented that French Catholic priests destroyed these plaques—for what reasons we may only surmise—thereby depriving science of the essential keys in the most stupendous of anthropological enigmas. Who knows what an Easter Island plaque might have revealed about the stone heads, the mysterious people who built them, about the origins of man. All of the plaques were not destroyed, however, for there are three or four of them locked up here with totems, fetishes and other primitive knickknacks in a dusty chamber. Wish I could smuggle one out to the experts at the Laboratory of Obsolete Impulses because the alphabet used in inscribing the plaques is totally unfamiliar to me. Except that, come to think of it, it does resemble fairly closely that faint writing on the palm of Amanda's hand.

  There are additional catacomb chambers through whose barred doorways I can detect the nasty evil glitter of silver and gold, and there is at least one room that is permanently sealed. I'm going to continue my snooping. Should I come across any startling stashes I'll inform you in my next letter. Meanwhile, pray that my employers don't learn that I'm not Brother Dallas, because that old Vatican jailhouse looks as mean as any I've seen in the dog lands of Mexico.

  Oh yes, while I think of it, John Paul, our mutual acquaintance George O. Supper has a studio not far from here. George is the first pop artist to win the Prix de Rome and he'll be in Italy all summer. Sunday, I'm going to slip into my civilian spy suit and pay him a call. George should have a lot of gossip about the New York art crowd, and maybe he'll have the grace to direct me to a good whorehouse. Happy zoo-keeping, and don't forget those pray
ers.

  Yrs. in His Holy Name,

  Plucky P.

  Mark Marvelous was beside himself. Double redheaded wow! Purcell's letter he took as a personal triumph, an academic accolade long overdue. It offered further proof, did it not, that the largest church in Christendom has been stilt-walking over quicksand for ages? Now Marvelous, having been recently engaged in religious research, was, even prior to the reading of Plucky's Wildcat Creek epistles, informed of the black side of churchly history. He was not ignorant of a single purge; no conquest, no Vatican intrigue had escaped his notice. But the comparative trifles that the Mad Pluck exposed seemed so instant, so direct that they excited him as secondary historical sources never could.

  The indiscretions itemized by Purcell were, so it seemed to Marvelous, indications of increasing Christian entropy. To wit: Christianity has gradually lost spiritual energy over the centuries, only to replace it with political and economic energy. That imbalance has warped the religious structure and although it has heightened its physical force it has pushed its spiritual potential toward zero. Political and/or economic power create frictional resistance to the natural flow of love. In the case of the Church, such friction has resulted in an engine that has considerable momentum but fails to generate salvation.

  Yes, Purcell's findings did a lot to bolster Marx's theory, and awarded the dropout thinker new hopes for the successful projection of future religious systems. On and on, Marvelous jabbered about it, jabbering to John Paul as the magician tied his loincloth, jabbering to Amanda until . . . he noticed the big green tears in her eyes.

  Had Purcell's disclosures upset her, poor angel? Had Marx's interpretations, underscoring as they did the decadence of our religious heritage, depressed her? No, it wasn't that. While looking out the bedroom window, Amanda had spotted—just below the southern nub of the giant benevolent weenie—a monarch butterfly, the first she'd seen in a year.

  Can we, with a straight face, regard it as an omen?

  "I understand,” said Marx Marvelous, “that as far as you are concerned the most important thing in life is style."

  Amanda sighed. She was being challenged again. Worse, her Wednesday bread-baking was being interrupted. As usual, she forgave the intrusion. “Marx Marvelous is in the process of shedding values,” she reasoned, “and as the old values are discarded his mind moves him closer and closer to questions of absolute meaning.” She preferred to think that was the case, rather than that Marx Marvelous was simply another intellectual tight-ass smugly ripping at every cosmic curtain to expose the specter of dank feminine (irrational!!!) mysticism that he is certain lurks behind it. She preferred not to link her zoo manager with those Time magazine types who regard every transcendental experience as some sort of Halloween prank, but who grow as unctuous as sperm whales when they run into a bishop at a cocktail party.

  Speaking on his own account, Marvelous still would admit to no interest in the “meaning of meaning.” “Purpose is not a scientific concern,” he would insist. “You see those stars up there—there is no reason for me to question their purpose or to speculate on their meaning. The age, position, size, velocity, distance from the Earth and chemical composition is the only information I desire about a star. Any additional data are destined to be vague and hesitating in comparison. When I learn what an object consists of and how it behaves, my curiosity about that object has very largely been satisfied.”

  Yes, Marx purported himself to be an objective man in an objective environment. He liked to assume that of all the billions of aspects of our total experience, only those aspects that inform us about the quantitative properties of material phenomena are concerned with the “real” world. He did believe, however, that man's (mostly illusory) sense of religion had a material counterpart. It was this belief, and his desire to acquaint himself with the quantitative laws of religious phenomena, that had, in fact, led him to the roadside zoo where, as materialistic as his attitude toward stars might be, he did not hesitate to enter verbatim in his notebook Amanda's assertion, “Stars are merely projections of the human psyche—they are pimples of consciousness—but they are at the same time quite real.”

  It is possible that Marvelous also recorded Amanda's thoughts on style. “Maybe I'm attracted to style because the notion of content is a very difficult notion for me to comprehend,” said she, patting dough into loaves. “When you subtract from an object the qualities it possesses, what do you have left? After you have taken from a star its age, position, size, velocity, distance from Earth and chemical composition, are you left with a hole in the sky—or something other? This lump of dough on the table has the properties of being soft, pliable, white, moist, smooth and cool to the touch. But what is it exactly, what is the thing—the content—that possesses those qualities? It can't be defined. I'm afraid that the notion of content has to be replaced by the notion of style.” She paused to brush back a curl, leaving, in the act, a gull of flour on her cheek. “But then I'm just reciting the voices, you know. The way the robot kids recite their catechism, the way a river recites the gradation of its bed, the way a farter recites his starch.”

  “Amen to that last,” said Marx Marvelous, “amen and amen again. It must have occurred to your 'voices' that content places limitations on style, in fact determines style. You believe in astrology, you contend that the color-light-magnetic pulsations of celestial bodies affect us to the extent of shaping our basic personalities. I say that's bull hockey because the total electrical output of the human body is about one two-thousandth of a volt, hardly enough force to be acted upon by planetary or stellar magnetism. But whether you favor astrology or a more rational concept such as genetics or behavioristic psychology, you must admit to a certain predetermining of our lives. Content is there before we are even consciously aware of it, it is all we have to work with and what that amounts to is that style is merely an expression of content. Tell me I'm right and I'll get out front and get ready to sell those sausages. Say, you're sure lovely with flour on your face. You look like Julia Child of the Spirits.”

  As she assigned her loaves to their stations in the oven, Amanda once more sighed. “I'm not going to choose between astrology and genetics because I fail to see any contradiction. The influences on the human animal are too complex and too paradoxical to be explained in terms of any one particular branch of knowledge. When I was twelve years old I watched a spider drink water. You think that didn't change my life?”

  In the rinsing of her mixing bowl her hands played like a line of dolphins. “Those folks who are concerned with freedom, real freedom—not the freedom to say 'shit' in public or to criticize their leaders or to worship God in the church of their choice, but the freedom to be free of languages and leaders and gods—well, they must use style to alter content. If our style is masterful, if it is fluid and at the same time complete, then we can re-create ourselves, or rather, we can re-create the Infinite Goof within us. We can live on top of content, float above the predictable responses, social programming and hereditary circuitry, letting the bits of color and electricity and light filter up to us, where we may incorporate them at will into our actions. That's what the voices said. They said that content is what a man harbors but does not parade. And I love a parade.”

  She nibbled a petal of batter from the curve of her wooden spoon. “By the way, Marx, when you're eating your bread tonight would you mind keeping an alert out for my pre-Columbian rock-crystal skull ring. I do believe I dropped it in the dough.”

  "I understand that you believe in cellular memory,” said Marx Marvelous, “that you think that a record of everything that has ever happened—including the secret most inner workings of the universe—is stored inside each human being's cells; and that under certain conditions you can browse in this cellular depository as in a library."

  Oh bother. He was at it again. It was a mild afternoon and the clouds were breaking. The sun, like a winning ace up the gray coat-sleeve of Skagit summer, had been played with a sudden flourish.
Amanda sat in the fir needles of the grove, eating a tomato and avocado sandwich, helping to rake in the chips. With some effort, she smiled sweetly at Marx's latest confrontation. The ragged lips of her sandwich smiled with her.

  Marx took her silence as an admission of guilt. “I can appreciate how you might have jumped to those conclusions blah blah blah . . . Jung's theory of racial memory and collective unconscious blah blah blah . . . drug-induced rememberings of experiences which you could not possibly have had in this lifetime blah blah blah . . . migratory habits of insects and birds blah blah blah . . . the stories primitive man told around the campfire; myths so complex, so multi-leveled, so insightful and symbolically revealing that no atavistic mind could possibly have made them up blah blah. I frankly cannot explain how human—or animal—intelligence has access to such material. Perhaps a form of memory is indeed involved. But I'll tell you this, Amanda, it is not any so-called cellular memory nor is it a part of the genetic process. Memory is a kind of phenomenon different from the retention of genetic information. Memory is an electrical phenomenon. Its impulses can be measured by instruments. The DNA genetic information process, on the other hand, is a chemical phenomenon. You need only consider the difference in an electrical reaction and a pure chemical reaction to see what a sloppy analogy you've made. Both the memory bank and DNA retain information, that's true. Both your Jeep and my wristwatch have wheels and mechanical workings. But you can't drive my wristwatch to town blah blah blah . . .”

  Amanda just grinned at this wonderful logic. (Her sandwich had nothing left to grin about.) But Nearly Normal Jimmy would not have stood for it. He would have countered Marvelous' cool argument with words of fire. John Paul Ziller and even Plucky Purcell might have argued with him, also, for to Marx's chagrin, Jimmy, who possessed the best instincts of capitalism, Ziller, an ultimate artist, and Purcell, a social activist at heart, all shared that tragic leaning toward the nonobjective and irrational shadows of life.