I later learned that Collazo was already in the restaurant; the good-for-nothing had seen me arrive, and had made a bet with himself as to how long it would take me to go look for him at the tables on the terrace. I’m glad that even at his age he sees well enough to take pleasure in that kind of mischief. I mumbled an awkward hello (automatic courtesies are trivial) and joined him at his grimy little table next to a row of parked cars. He seemed amused to see me. Without wasting a second, he spoke to the waiter with a certain cold attentiveness that I have observed before in similar individuals.
After asking the waiter for a dizzying number of details and clarifications, Collazo leaned back in his chair and gestured as if proctoring an exam. I shrugged, and gave the kind of evil little laugh that the male libido will go far out of its way to hear as angelic. He asked me something about my thesis. I answered at length, looking over at him from time to time through the fog of my aversion. He fingered his thick mustache, at times softly, at times twisting it down to the corners of his mouth and nibbling at it, as if what he had arched above his mouth was a delicious miniature version of me.
The waiter poured the wine for him to try, a Poligny Montrésor, and Collazo nodded his approval. When he noticed that I was singing quietly along with the music, he asked for it to be turned up. It was a marvelous ballad by The Platters, and a careful look through the menu combined deliciously with our smiles.
The waiter divided each dish into two equal portions, but gave Collazo most of the parsley. The tender orange-and-ruby colored slices of meat slid meekly across the white porcelain, accompanied by glazed baby potatoes, almonds and capers. Collazo grinned at me, and I grinned back. I was afraid, of course, but I knew that I had to provoke him if I wanted to see the monster that the theory had in store for me. The Chardonnay was a murmur of pale gold in our glasses, and now . . . en garde! I gave a twist he could not have foreseen, plunging the dagger into the left side of his vanity.
Collazo calmly leaned toward me, his eyebrows stiff with cruelty. I lifted my chin, my narrowed eyes now oblique to his pitifulness. Then I said something so evil that I prefer not to transcribe it here.
He looks at me coldly, as if intending to impale me. He knows that he can’t let his gaze drop to where my cleavage awaits: if I’m able to capture his eyes there, leave him stuttering at the edge of that precipice, my ampleness will render painless what he clearly intends to be an excruciating silence. His face, naked, caught like a bug in glue. My fiery torrent has come calmly to an end at “and what then?” I can see the gray hairs poking out through his shirt front, and above, his wrinkled Adam’s apple now erect. His self-consciousness betrays him. He laughs—it’s just that I’m so funny.
This sort of back-and-forth is essential to my plan. I must provoke him until fury and fascination leave him completely blind, unable to think. That’s when my thoughts will spill in through the syntactical holes in what is, theoretically, his free will, and there will be no saving him then, no escape. For now he sees only the water’s surface, the reflection of his self-portrait as on-stage seducer rocking gently on the waves. He doesn’t know (can’t know) that this ocean is full of heads, thousands of them, heads from my collection (and a few from Augustus’s), all laughing at him. As Sun Tzu once wrote, “if your opponent is of choleric temperament, seek to irritate him.” If he is arrogant, encourage his narcissism. And if he’s in the process of making a mistake (says Napoleon) don’t stop him. In the end Collazo must be the one to throw himself on top of me, and I must cuddle up to him and bear it. I have to, even if it disgusts me so much I can’t breathe.
For the moment, much to my chagrin, this supposed challenge isn’t, strictly speaking, the problem closest at hand. For Collazo, the real problem is the interval (the density, the syntax) between my calm and his silence, one that requires a demonstration of proportional violence. He’ll have to distill a shot of pure acid to wipe this expression off my face, and frankly it is in my interest for him to do so: otherwise that rhetorical burbling of a few moments ago could lead him to believe that I’m after some insignificant little triumph. To attack the argument that my momentary peace is mere solipsistic vanity, Collazo could employ any combination of bodily disdain + a line of reasoning other than the absurd path being laid by what we will call, for now, Impudence, that great maw-softener—if only in the interest of rescuing the delicate project of his own good mood from a nervous date’s awkward outpourings.
Fingering his mustache, Collazo stayed calm. His fork flipped a caper back and forth. Then he punctured it, and looked at my mouth:
–I must say, I’m very impressed that you caught that hidden reference to Marx’s The German Ideology. I didn’t know that people your age (here he ran his tongue across his lips) were still reading things like that.
Of course I made light of the brilliance of my memory, politely minimizing the whole affair. But my hand, deep in my backpack, twitched against the cover of Fetish, with its frenzied photographic collage of haute droite characters. Oh, Collazo could never even imagine my piercing theories on 20th century nationalism! I gently explained that from the moment we entered university, all students were bombarded with the insights of a whole execution wall’s worth of Commies, and that the complete works of both Kautsky and the ex-People’s Commissar for Naval and Military Affairs, Trotsky, were listed among the texts that we had to memorize as we stood in formation during the school’s patriotic ceremonies.
Collazo gestured for me to stop. He squinted beneath his bristly eyebrows, his face gone to stone like the solemn bust of some gauche caviar prince. He let his gaze drift into the distance and said, very slowly, the words of another, phrase by phrase as they flowered in his mind:
–“These innocent . . . and puerile fantasies . . . of the philosophy of the young . . . whose philosophical bleatings only mimic the opinions . . . of the German bourgeoisie, these sheep . . .”
–“These sheep who take themselves, and are taken, to be wolves.”
–It’s been so long since I’ve recited that, he said, taking a bite of glazed potatoes, nodding his thanks. What a great quote. One of my favorite books of the period.
I took advantage of the fact that he was chewing, and added that ever since the Knowledge Industry decided to proclaim itself critical (i.e. since the dernier cri of its blusterings is to fancy itself a critic), humanism has been reduced to the republican version of intellectual purity; in the end, product differentiation is as important for (and within) the academy as it is for the capitalist corporations that academics love to hate. My disquisition, though perhaps a bit nerdy, appeared to have gained me a new, mustachioed adept. I blinked several times and added a few anacoluthons, feigning self-doubt so that he wouldn’t feel diminished (and thereby emasculated) in the face of such a powerful demonstration of argumentative mastery. He acknowledged my commentaries with a laugh.
We were about to start our conversation back up (I’d made a silent bet with myself that this daring warrior would be on the watch for any opportunity to destroy me; only then would I show my fangs) when a profoundly secondary character caught our attention. At the table next to ours, a bottle-blonde with a swarthy past couldn’t quite decide between the suckling pig and the octopus a la gallega. Her pronunciation revealed an accent that would tear itself to shreds on razor wire if the authorities ever found the time to build a fence around Buenos Aires. Given that Menemism had been banned on aesthetic grounds, any excessive yellow in one’s pileous hue was now seen as shameless, and the woman’s blatherings, which included scattered capitalistic semiwords like “AmEx,” dissolved in the air like smoke signals emitted from some dismal raft of bad taste adrift on the current of time.
Collazo muffled an improvised chuckle with his napkin. The moral distance between our table and theirs led naturally to the forging of a sort of allied front between Collazo and me. It was then that he took advantage of my distraction, intrepidly captured my hand, and kis
sed it.
My first steps into adulthood have left me ill-equipped to differentiate between fury and other sources of heat. His mouth was still pressed tight against my hand. Then something fluttered beneath his preputial eyelid: it was passion, rumpled and lethal, capable of blowing the human heart to pieces (cf. Rucci’s Murder by Montoneros, 9-25-73). Collazo was (is) a horrible man, but that doesn’t make him any less attractive to my eyes. The little beast of hatred I carry inside quivers every time it hears his name.
–Mr. Collazo, can I bother you for a second? Would you mind signing this? It’s for my great-aunt, she’s been wanting to read your books since forever, a man said, leaning next to our table.
As he kindly leaned over to accede to my request, stretching out the moment with a question full of feigned attentiveness and a long pull on his cigarette, I got a clean look at his bald head. The sight took me back to Episode Zero. My blonde friend Ilona and I were looking down from our balcony seats at the award ceremony for the most important prize in Spanish literature. On the brightly lit dais far below glowed the bald heads of a bunch of fat emeriti. A fiery applause swept the great hall, advancing like napalm up to the ankles of the writerly tribunes holding court. And the prize goes to . . . A name, and a new wave of napalm flowing from the tireless palms of three thousand overly wined and overly dined attendees; spoons are left suspended in midair as waiters turn to look, and even the restroom attendants peek out of their holes. The Man of the Evening strides athletically up to the podium and smiles—not even the smoke from all this clapping can throw him off his game. He taps the mike with two fingers, brings his most powerful orifice up close to the metal protuberance.
–Good evening. I would like to thank—
–Who is this guy? Ilona asks me in English.
Her pale hand flails in frustration—if only she had binoculars. Her teeth are stained purple, and apart from her violet silk dress, she’s wearing nothing but a ring of Russian amber; a champagne glass trembles in her fingers. She is gorgeous, her gray-green eyes gazing out into the distance as if catching sight of foxes in some scene from Tolstoy (lupa homini lupus). Down below, several men in suits stare up at us, their posture that of hunters. Ilona glides up tight against the balcony’s golden rail, and one knee slides sinuously into view. The air is impregnated with pheromones. I grab her around the waist; it is my duty to inform her that the men below are waiting for us to fall so that they might gather us up. She ceases the mermaid act, sticks out her tongue and laughs. We are utter tourists at a party that has nothing to do with us.
–So who is this guy again?
–Some left-handed writer, (and then almost cooing as we sway softly there at the rail), the kind of guy whose life I wouldn’t mind ruining.
She kept laughing, clicking her teeth against the edge of her champagne glass, not caring a bit. It isn’t that she’d become accustomed to this type of high-flown celebration. (You can always count on one witness and one victim to bring forth a realist prose.) As for Collazo, it wasn’t hard to get him excited about the possibility of adding his books to the departmental syllabi. The prospect of hearing his own name pronounced in professorial tones, and of a row of full-figured students murmuring it, taking their pencils out of their mouths to jot it down, was enough to guarantee his cordial devotion. I wish he’d hold his mouth still; he often grimaces in a way that inadvertently shows his teeth, rabbit-like.
We said our goodbyes at the door of the restaurant. The street was empty. Just as I turned the corner, I realized that he was following me, half-hidden as he snuck along toward me. A beam of dim green light made and unmade the street-side shadows. I walked quietly, tight against the wall—a public zone reserved for women and those marked for death. The faint gleam filtering down through the treetops was now at my back, as if pushing me toward the cone of darkness ahead. And now Collazo sprung his ambush, came tight along my flank to intimidate me, a rapid maneuver that took advantage of the scarcity of light. I kept my eyes on him as I retreated, and my knees cracked against the side of a flower box. He lunged forward. He had me precisely where he wanted me, akimbo there on the sidewalk. His broad silhouette blocked out the light. I couldn’t see anything but the chest hair poking out through his shirt, and above, that mouth, that threat.
–You know, I had a really good time with you tonight.
His eyes traced me up and down as he spoke, his thoughts as clear as any slogan: I’ll calm the little kitten, let her know that I’d like a little something more. I didn’t say a word; my back hunched as if skinned like an animal. My triangle of love had swollen in all three dimensions. Collazo brought his hand softly to my coccyx, pressed down the way one does to get a dog to sit. A whimper escaped me. He looked me in the eyes, kissed me on the forehead, and let me go.
2.1
Individual consciousness boils down to vanity, whose applications form an interface around the body. Because love is a subtitle for something much more specific, more sidereal. Individual consciousness can only relate to others through itself, using the language of vanity. The Theory is unequivocal: it affirms a plot of divine manners lurking under the form of human interest. It unfolds the excess, the intimacy of being in the First Person, while knowing full well that there are Second Persons and Third Persons whose existence with mine, and only through me. The hierarchy of thought imposes a hierarchy on the order of things. The seductive powers of syntax (for those who observe its rules with both pomp and modesty) grow ever stronger by subjugating those gathered around the one who organizes the verbs.
I have plans for this man.
2.1.1
Thinking of Collazo’s old, monkey-like eyes, I stroke Montaigne’s white fur in the hope she will meow in understanding. The little one purrs beneath my hands. With her eyes half-closed, she watches a cockroach walk calmly toward the kitchen, much as one watches the world pass by from aboard a train—impassive, both of us watching. Holding that thought, I glide over to the flamboyant centerpiece of my library (the secret altar I have raised in honor of Hobbes) and catch sight of the question that now rises up through the cat hair: How does one ambush human beings? Back in the pavilions of past time and forward into the encolumned future, syntagma is the term used for a military formation that was invented in the 4th century B.C. and involves two hundred fifty-six warriors:
Other formations included the tetrarchia, made up of sixty-four men, and the taxiarchia, of one hundred twenty-eight; two taxiarchias formed a syntagma, and four syntagmas made up a chiliarchia, which had a total of one thousand twenty-four men. The syntagma prevailed as the most maneuverable of these groups, much like the Roman centurias born of the Marian reforms. When combined with the new weapons and tactics developed by Philip II of Macedon (most notably the sarissa, a long shaft with an iron spearhead at one end and a bronze butt-spike at the other to provide balance), in 338 B.C. they decimated the most prestigious military corps of the ancient world: the Sacred Band of Thebes. This decisive battle, which took place at Chaeronea, led to a crucial change in the very conception of war.
The Thebans utilized the first and only military formation ever inspired by a Platonic dialogue (Plutarch specifically cites the speech of Phaedrus in the Symposium), and had triumphed in what Pausanias considered the most significant conflict pitting Greeks against Greeks, the Battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C. Their elite corps was composed of one hundred and fifty pairs of homosexual warriors. In the flirtatious conversations at the banquet described by Plato, the one at which Phaedrus spoke, it was posited that homosexual warriors were preferable to heterosexual ones, because fighting alongside one’s beloved was an incentive to unfurl one’s courage and other virtues of war.
When the syntagmas of Philip II crushed the brave gay duos of Thebes, the Macedonian style of fighting came to predominate, and the theory of war popularized by the author of The Republic was reduced to ashes, along with the final pyres whereon laid the bodies of the valiant s
odomites. Philip had trained his men to form themselves into a uniquely lethal beast; as distinct from earlier combat (and combat theory), where the possibility of winning honor stoked the individual strength and courage of each warrior, the Macedonian model entailed soldiers uniting to form a single body composed of infantry, archery, cavalry and siege weapons. Strictly speaking, they were a single hand of implacable fingers closing on the enemy’s throat. Greek military homophilia had been definitively displaced by a theory of war that sought to revive a lost herd instinct, invoking the figure of the supreme predator with a beast built of thousands of men. The fact that the number of warriors involved in each of Philip’s formations was a power of two no doubt stoked the formal appetite of Johan van Vliet, who saw in the Macedonian syntagmas a milestone in the technical transformation of men into beasts, later perfected by the pact between masses and State known as the republic (where the pact of conquest is the sovereign’s secret).
One of Philip’s tactics was to provoke the enemy all the way to the bitter end.
2.1.2
The purity of the horror involved should not, must not, be assuaged. I must act upon him so as to inspire armies of organized brutality sent vectoring toward me. I muse upon my options: 1. To cause him to throw himself upon me like a wolf, voracious, brutal; 2. To watch him sniff and salivate at my nymphean estuary.
The blow cannot fall in vain. I must swap out his venereal appetite for the blood-stained excess that is at stake. It isn’t enough simply to arouse his desperation, his unconditional surrender to my delicious parts. I have to make him gather every ounce of strength and brutishness, make him reveal to me the purest form of the monster of dominance and destruction, because only then . . . The night does not flee from the wolf of the night: deep in the silvery foliage of the world, it lets the wolf lick its throat, hides the wolf beneath its mantle, and waits. It doesn’t matter if disgust causes my skin to crawl; he will throw himself on top of me, and I will quietly resist. The worse it is—the more strongly, the more violently he takes me—the better. Yes, the worse it is, the better. To distance myself from the horror, I try to focus on the fact that though I must yield in the name of his pleasure, he—we, Augustus—we serve in the name of justice. It isn’t enough to dangle a delicious fruit vert before his eyes, and watch him prepare to gorge. I must produce, indirectly, through him, into me, the bloodbath whose repercussions will be felt in the System of Persons. I must work through him, and yet not: it’s like hypnotizing a lion.
Savage Theories Page 11
