by Iyer, Pico
“There’s something different about you,” Nigel said after dinner, as they started clearing away the dishes. “Something strange. I can’t put my finger on it, but, I don’t know, you’re different.”
“It must be California.”
“Must be,” said his friend, who didn’t sound delighted by the change. “You seem more serious in a way. More—how can I put it?—hungry.”
“It doesn’t sound like a good thing, the way you put it.”
“Probably isn’t, no. Are you going to call Martine while you’re here?” He slipped it in so casually, it was clearly what he’d been leading up to all along.
“I think she’s probably glad of a break from me.”
“Yes. That part hasn’t changed.” And Nigel was off again, to collect the salt and pepper shakers, while he went on with the drying. When he went out, the rites complete, his friend said, “Sleep well. If we don’t see you in the morning, give us a call sometime when you’re back home.”
In the morning, however, they were both waiting for him in the kitchen, bleary over mugs of Nescafé, and Nigel left him with “Don’t lose your sense of humor, will you?”
“I don’t think I can, if I’m studying religion.”
“No, suppose you’re right. Anyway, it’s good to see you, even if you do seem half mad.”
At the airport, in the departure lounge, he picked up a receiver and put in his card, then held the instrument in place and put it down again. Whatever he said at this point could only come out wrong: if he sounded happy, if he sounded bereft—all of it could only be an insult.
“So the prodigal returns,” Alejandro said in his ironic way, three days later, outside the lecture hall, as they bumped into each other in the corridor, on their way to Ryan McCarthy.
“And the fatted calf awaits him.”
“How was it?”
“Amazing; really amazing. It sounds stupid, I know, but it really puts you in your place.”
“I can imagine. Hafez Assad has that effect, I’ve heard.”
Though Alex had been in California for three years or more, he’d never lost the raised eyebrow of Buenos Aires.
“And you? What have I missed?”
“Everything. Nothing. I toil in the pastures of the heartbroken. Becoming a doctor who can’t heal when I wish only to be a bachelor once more.” He spoke a strange, overflowery English, fluent, but sounding, often, as if it had passed through Spanish first.
“And so our investigation into the death of God proceeds,” his friend went on as they passed through the open doors and claimed some seats a few rows in from the back. “ ‘Can you tell us where you were on the night of May 17? We have reason to believe that it was then that this person with whom you were involved—the “Higher Power,” as He is sometimes called—first went missing. Unless you can shed some light on when you saw Him last, we will have to presume Him dead.’ ” He’d come to this New World to make a new life for himself, everyone assumed; but he’d never lost his habit of masking his intentions in the devices of the Old.
Around them the same faces as usual were taking the same seats as usual, some near the back, with a view to a rapid escape, others near the front, in the hopes of a rapid ascent. Religious Studies was in permanent danger of following the gods it studied into oblivion; though the number of its students was ever on the rise, that was mostly because it presented itself now as a science, and offered classes on “Rage” and “Men’s Wildness.” A researcher from MIT—so the persistent rumor ran—had actually been called in to conduct experiments on how laboratory mice responded to an image of the Virgin Mary.
Sefadhi still fought a rearguard action, however, and he was a seasoned and determined fighter, “from a culture where faith is not such a dirty word,” as he was fond of saying, glossing over some of the finer points of Persian history. He’d made it his mission to bring in wandering speakers, like prophets from the desert, to remind the rabble of “primordial fire,” as he called it. Now, standing at the podium, he shuffled through his notes and motioned for a lowering of the lights, a return to sacred silence.
“Fortune, the ancients held, favored those who paid homage to it in secret,” he began, speaking with the forgotten courtesies of his native Isfahan. “Much as a woman might drop a handkerchief to lure a passing knight’s gaze towards her window. Just so, we in Religious Studies must have been burning offerings in private to merit the visit of one such as Ryan McCarthy.”
There were a few uncertain snickers, the inevitable rolled eyes. The ornamental phrases rolled on and on—treasures scattered out of a jeweled box—and their object, a man with tufts of reddish hair around his ears, and an aging herringbone jacket with huge patches on its sleeves, stood up to take the stand.
“Many of you, I know, are familiar,” Sefadhi continued, bald head glinting in the lights (and the visiting dignitary sitting down again), “with Professor McCarthy’s ground-breaking work on scriptures in a secular world, Sensuous Seducers, with its elegant subtitle, Lures and Gambits in the Bible. All of you, I know, are acquainted with his exchange with Huston Smith in the Journal of Religious Studies. But none of that, I think, can prepare us for what he will be sharing with us today. It is with something more than honor, and with a feeling much deeper than pride, that I give you Professor Ryan McCarthy.”
The applause was scattered, and then the promised savior got up again and trudged over to the podium, looking around all the while as if he’d blown his cue again. When he faced them, they could see, even if he could not, that his blue-striped shirt was misbuttoned and his shoelaces were loose. He looked like a passerby dragged by mistake into a frat-house party.
He cleared his throat, straightened the papers before him, and, looking down, began to flick, half desperately, through them.
“Another step forward in the long march of the soul,” muttered Alejandro, who had the schoolboy’s way of defining himself by what he could see through.
“The subject of my address to you today,” McCarthy began, speaking faster as he picked up the thread of his talk, “though hardly worthy of the praise that Professor Sefadhi has lavished on it, with such characteristic generosity” (he glowed down at the front row), “is what I have called the ‘Higher Temptations.’ The devices by which we are pulled towards the good. By this, of course, I refer not to those common wiles and stratagems that seem to take us farther from our destinies, but to those that return us to our original mission, if I may put it in those words.”
Bodies slumped lower in their seats, and all around was a faint scattering of whispers exchanged, and notes passed back and forth.
“It is commonly supposed, even—I dare say, especially—by us Catholics” (there was a ripple of laughter, as if to acknowledge that he was trying to be human), “that the Devil has been given all the best lines. Iago is a wordsmith, Othello professes inarticulacy. Satan makes off with the poet’s verses. Yet why, I wonder, should Satan’s master and maker—his evident superior—not have as many words at His disposal? Are we to surmise that words themselves are a part of the fallen Creation? All life, after all, is a constant, agitated battle between those who see this world as the only one that matters— earthly patriots, as we might call them—and those who remain true to another order. Are words the instruments only of the mortal?”
Every now and then someone laughed, but it was in the nervous, uncertain fashion of someone laughing at a foreign film as if in happy surprise that these people were just like us.
“Scholars might assert, in fact, that Satan’s greatest temptation to Jesus is to imagine himself beyond the temptation of a Satan. ‘Tell us you’re the son of God,’ he says, like a master logician, ‘tell us you can never die.’ His offer, in effect, is to make Jesus a lord of infinite riches in a world that doesn’t exist.”
This was more, perhaps, than any of those in attendance had expected, and the audience had not yet given up on him entirely.
“Here, perhaps,” he went on, putting dow
n his typescript and picking up a large book, “I can give you an example of a higher calling.
“ ‘Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest, so is my beloved among young men.’ ” His voice was high and shaky, and the words got lost or smothered, yet something of their tingle still came through. “ ‘To sit in his shadow is my delight, and his fruit is sweet to my taste. He has taken me into the wine-garden and given me loving glances. Sustain me with raisins, revive me with apples; for I am faint with love. His left arm pillows my head, his right arm is around me.’ ”
He put the book down again, and faced his startled audience once more. “Thus can we see how some scholars maintain that ‘Eve’ comes not from the Hebrew word for ‘life,’ but from the Aramaic for ‘serpent.’ Which of us, after all, would be proof against such lines?
“And yet, of course, to the believer this is as it should be. The sensuous words are a call not to pleasure but, if anything, its repudiation— or, at least, transcendence. They mark a summons to what we might call, without undue exaggeration, the highest and the truest in us.” He beamed over at them from his place onstage. “All religious verse, we may say—and here I refer not only to the poetry of our own tradition, but to the love songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama, the Zen verses of Ikkyu, the riddles of the Sufis—all religious verse is written in a kind of code. It is administering a test to us. That could, in fact, be adduced as one of the signs of religious verse: that it moves as if inside a veil.”
Here, as he rose towards his climax, the papers on the podium began to form new patterns of disarray, and it seemed as if he would as easily move from omega to alpha as the other way round. He fumbled for a moment over a word he couldn’t read, then realized he’d lost his place.
“The sensuous seducer claims another conquest,” murmured Alejandro, sinking deeper into his seat.
“Thus,” the visitor continued, trying to regain his momentum, “all religious verse speaks to us in a language we can understand. To those with eyes and ears the poems are a kind of holy come-on; to those without, they appear as love songs, emblems of profanity. These ceremonial seductions, if so I may denote them, are a way of defining our relations to the world around us. A good man sees a man in rags, sitting in the street, and recognizes him as an angel traveling incognito; another man sees the same creature, and writes him off as a homeless beggar. We are no greater than the height of our perceptions.”
Again, he put down his text and broke into an antique, mockpoetic voice.
“ ‘May I find your breasts like clusters of grapes on the vine, your breath sweet-scented like apples, your mouth like fragrant wine flowing smoothly to meet my caresses, gliding over my lips and teeth.’ ”
“Where is Joni Mitchell when we need her?” asked Alejandro from his place, slumped down towards the ground.
“Who you are, in short, what you believe, and where you stand on the cosmic battlefield—everything is in its way revealed, perhaps defined, by how you respond to these verses. Do you see a sensual incitation or an epithalamion in the realm of the invisible? All that separates one from the other is a curtain of assumptions. And no argument or preaching or scholarly discourse can raise the curtain for those who see it, or lower the curtain for those who don’t. The religious transaction is—it has to be—a love affair conducted in the inner chambers of the heart. Those not party to it”—he cleared his throat here, for his crescendo—“can do no more than turn away in embarrassed silence, or cling to their own quite different loves.”
A round of surprisingly enthusiastic applause greeted the end of the talk, and not only because it was the end: if nothing else, the man himself had seemed what Debra Saperstein habitually called a “performative statement”—his very being brought home the point of his lecture more forcibly than his words could. To those with the right kind of ears, he could seem a luminous messenger; to everyone else, just a vague figure staring over his stand at the scattering of claps, and squinting without much pleasure as someone said something about the Song of Songs as the only book in the Bible that failed to mention God and someone else said something about the second-century rabbi who, in spite of that (because of that?), had called it the “Holy of Holies.”
Faced with their challenges, he peered over the lectern like an uncle who suddenly realizes that he was supposed to bring the Christmas presents.
“Of course there is much virtue in what you say,” he said, in answer to a question about the sovereignty of the subjective. “The death of the author is a way of talking about the death of God. The world itself becomes a poem whose author disappeared long ago. Like, in fact, the Song of Songs. Yet for me—born, perhaps, into a different world, and a different generation, from your own—every comma is, in a way, a fragment of God. I stand, so to speak, on the far side of the invisible veil.”
He’d put himself out of harm’s way, though for most of the beings in the room his admission merely underlined his irrelevance.
“What better note on which to end?” said Sefadhi, abruptly rising to his feet, and bringing the confrontation to a close. Averting blood-shed was his strength. “Or, should I say, on which to begin? For what Professor McCarthy has given us today is not just the fruit of decades of deep scholarship; it is, no less, the stimulus for decades of serious thought to come. Thank you, Professor McCarthy; and thank you, one and all.”
A few bodies began to get up, and then Sefadhi went on. “I am reminded of the ancient Sufi tale in which a seeker, knocking at his master’s door, hears the sheikh call out, ‘Who is it?’ ‘It is I, sir, me,’ he responds, and the teacher’s voice calls back, ‘Go away! Where there is an “I,” there can be no true instruction. Come back when you are no one.’ ”
More bodies got up now, as if to force him to be quiet, and, with some claps of relieved applause, they all began making for the refreshments next door.
“So God, we learn, is an Irish mystic,” said Alejandro, gathering his books and standing up.
“I liked it. He didn’t make distinctions between religions; only around them.”
“He knows his audience,” said Alex dryly, and led him into the room where plastic bottles of Diet Coke and 7-Up sat sentinel above paper plates filled with unpromising wedges of cheese. He cast a quick glance around the room to see who might be worthy of his attention and then said, “That girl over there? You know her?”
He followed his friend’s eyes to a wall where a young woman was sitting on a folding chair, by herself, balancing a paper plate on her knees, and concentrating on her drink as if not to advertise her loneliness.
“She was at the back of the hall, I think. With someone else.”
Not missing a moment, Alex began walking across the room to see where this new adventure might lead. As they went over, slipping between bodies, they heard someone say something about Eliade, and the “erasure of the Other”—“apocalyptic pressures” and the “abolition of Eternity”—and then they found themselves in front of the stranger, as she looked in startled shyness up.
“You are,” said Alejandro, “a spy, perhaps, here to inspect us lesser mortals? Or eager to see what happens to those of us who make raids upon the unknowable?”
The woman looked up at him, bewildered by his extravagance. “I’m here with my friend,” she said. “She’s—somewhere over there.” She pointed towards the crowds, and Alex turned around for no more than a second. “Are you from England?”
“Buenos Aires,” he said, “but it comes to the same thing. I studied with the nuns in Hurlingham.”
“Great,” she said, uncertainly, going back to her cheese. “That sounds really exotic.”
“And you,” he continued, pantomiming some Latin charmer, “you are a supporter of Professor McCarthy? Or just a passing admirer?”
“It’s my friend,” she said, unhelpfully. “She’s into this stuff—or at least her sister is. I just came to keep her company.”
“A surrogate spy, then. You are forgiven.”
She look
ed up at him with a smile that said she still didn’t know what was going on, and he, with all the gallantry he could muster, looked around the room. “I’m sorry to say I must return to my labors,” he said, “but I wish you sweet dreams, and good data to take back to the sister,” and then turned towards the exit. “The passage from the spirit to the senses,” he whispered back over his shoulder, as they left, “may be less direct than the good professor would have us believe.”
He’d got in the habit, on summer evenings, of riding his bike along the path above the cliffs, past the mattresses that stood on terraces, the shopping carts left out on the street, everything that spoke of this as a society in transit, in flux. All student communities have this air of having just been thrown together to be disassembled with the next season, but here in California, the air of improvisation never ended. “It’s like a whole society of students,” he’d written to Martine soon after he arrived. “I mean, everything’s permanently in motion and everyone’s about to find the love or secret of his life. I think that’s what really makes it feel most like a desert. The sense of every day being founded on shifting sands.” What he hadn’t bothered to say, though she knew him well enough to guess at it, was that it was therefore a perfect place for someone who wanted to live alone; you can’t fall in love in a place that lacks all mystery.
His other habit, in the summer, was of pouring himself a drink when he got home, usually around nine-thirty, and taking it out to the terrace, as he called it to himself. Though walled and covered, the room he used for a study had once been an open veranda facing onto the sea, and even now, despite the windows and the way in which it had been made to look like an extra room, it had the feeling of the outdoors, the long views and closeness to wind that had brought him to the West. On quiet evenings he sat at his desk, the sea foaming and receding before him, the moon sending patterns across the darkness, and imagined he was in a different century, and the rolling swells before him were sand.
