Three Trapped Tigers
Page 35
(Where, in this company, would Arsenio Cué stand?)
I will show you the one number which is truly perfect. (He paused and looked at me.) Doesn’t it seem strange to you that on almost all typewriters, certainly on yours, the sign for numbers is above the 3, as if to say this is The Number? It is the great square.
(With great ostentation he picked up a paper napkin and pulled my pen out of my pocket. He started drawing numbers.)
4 9 2
(He paused. I thought he was going to add them up.)
4 9 2
3 5 7
(He stopped drawing numbers and looked at me. They are all prime numbers, he said.)
4 9 2
3 5 7
8
(Let’s hope the last one isn’t as drunk as you, I said. Or at the slightest provocation we will be in the clutches of infinity.)
4 9 2
3 5 7
8 1
(Stability for you, he said, smiling, and for me too.)
4 9 2
3 5 7
8 1 6
(He looked at the piece of paper triumphantly, as though he had invented or was about to invent this numerical square.)
There you are. The magic square. It’s worth as much as a circle. He looked at me as though waiting for me to ask him why. (Why?) Because however you add it up you will get the number 15. Vertically, diagonally and horizontally it makes 15. You can see also that the sum of these digits, 1 and 5, is 6, which is the last number in the series and if you subtract 1 from 5 you get 4, which is the first number of the square.
As you can see, the 0 is missing. Historically this proves that the square existed before the Arabs, because formerly it was made of letters which served as numbers. For me this is the square of life.
(I wanted to tell him that he was a latter-day Euclidean, but I saw an early Pythagorean in his answer.)
This is the denial of your nothingness. Of 0.
Aleatory literature:
(At this point I began criticizing him—a pluribus unum: I am always like that: I react against the thing I have in front of me, even if it’s my own mirror image—reproaching him for allowing himself to be carried away by numbers, and he answered me with a quotation:)
I only trust in things uncertain
All things plain seem clouded over
I only doubt the truth that’s certain
Only in chance do I feel sure
And when I win, then I’m the loser
FRANÇOIS VILLON
Ballade du Concours de Blois
(That’s literature, I think I said.)
No, literature is this Possible Masterpiece; it would be necessary to rewrite Le Rouge et le Noir, page after page, line by line,
sentence by sentence, word after word, letter by letter. It would even be necessary to put periods and commas on top of periods and commas, in the same place, avoiding the original periods and commas with the utmost care. One would have to place the dots on the i’s (and on the j’s, I said) over the i’s, without displacing the original dots. The man who did this and succeeded in writing a radically different book, the same but different, would have achieved The Masterpiece. The man who signed such a book (Pierre Menard, I interrupted Arsenio didn’t disagree with me but said: You too thought it was him!) with the name of (here a borgesian pause followed) of Stendhal would have achieved the Absolute Masterpiece.
(It’s a blueprint drafted with sympathetic ink.)
No. Nor is it a program. The only possible literature for me would be an aleatory literature. (Like random music? I asked.) No, it wouldn’t have a score, just a dictionary. (I must have been thinking of Bustrófedon because he immediately corrected himself:) Or rather a list of words that wouldn’t have any order at all, in which your friend Zeno wouldn’t simply join hands with Avicenna, which is too easy because they are opposites, but both of them would find themselves in the company of cabbage soup or shotgun or moon. Along with the book the reader would be provided with an anagram to make a title out of and a couple of dice. With these three elements anyone would be able to make his own book. If he throws a 1 and a 3, then he can look for the first and third words or even for word number 4 or even the thirteenth word—or for all of them together, and these could be read in an arbitrary order so as to abolish or increase the element of chance. The arrangement of the list of words would also be arbitrary, and both this and the reader’s rearrangement would be decided by the dice. Perhaps in this way we would get real poems and the poet would once more become a maker or a troubadour. The aleatory would then no longer be merely an approximation or a metaphor. Alea jacta est means the die is cast, as I hope you know.
(You know El B has an idea that’s not so different from yours?)
Really? What is it? Do I know it?
(Was he worried by what I said or simply interested? That’s what I thought but I said: He thinks or rather thought that it would be possible to make a book out of three or two or even one word! He told me once he had succeeded in writing a whole page consisting of precisely one single—and he stressed: not married—word.)
Chano Pozo got there before, circa 1946, in his guaracha “Blen blen blen.” Remember? It didn’t have any lyrics except
Score
Blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen blen
What would Mary MacArty say about this?
What would Susana Domingo have to say?
What about Virginia Beowulf, whom you could call Nirvana Cacanova?
“You and I together in earth, in smoke, in dust, in shadows, in nothing.”
How to kill an elephant: aboriginal method:
In Africa there are few rivers so deep that an animal as enormous as the elephant is obliged to swim and it is common enough to see migratory herds wading across the current. Often the water doesn’t rise above knee level (the knees of an elephant, that is), but sometimes it completely covers the animal. Then they walk along the bed of the river, with only their trunks appearing above the surface, like breathing periscopes.
The black hunters can then without any difficulty take advantage of the elephant when he is crossing a river. They tie a weight to a spear and hurl it at the snorkel of flesh from a canoe. The weight causes the trunk to sink and De Oliphant to drown.
Eight hours later (not by a watch: by African time) the gases inside the carcass of the elephant make him float to the surface. H
e remains there like a harpooned whale and the natives can then easily capture their prey.
(It was, obviously, a quotation. Where the hell did he get it from, this metaphysical Charlie McCarthy?)
Popuhilarity:
Someone once said that the popularity of the word metaphysics is due to the fact that it can mean whatever you like.
Pascalm:
& People mistake what are only the Virtues for their virtues. Ethical superstitions.
& When somebody says, I have no respect for those who are powerful, what he means is that one shouldn’t have any respect for those who are powerful. All of us pay respect to the strong and accept it from those who are weak. This last, despite any false declaration to the contrary: I hate flattery. This was Hegel’s one really remarkable discovery (an ad hoc grimace from me, Silvestre), this immemorial relationship between slave and master, a discovery so profound that it makes one forget that the same man once said: “What one knows is greater than what one doesn’t know.”
The French make a virtue out of lucidity which is really nothing more than a vice: an ideal vision of life, which is in reality confused. At least, my life (which is the only one I know more or less well) is confused.
There are people who see life as ordered and logical, the rest of us know that it is absurd and confused. Art (like religion or science or philosophy) is just one more attempt to focus the light of order on the gloom of chaos. Lucky you, Silvestre, who can (or think you can) get anywhere with words. Passwords.
& It is a pity that art endeavors to imitate life. Dopey & Happy the times when life copies art.
The only thing eternal is eternity:
& Death is a return to the point of departure, a completing of the circle, a way back to a total future. In other words, to the past, to the past as well. In other words, to eternity. If you like you can add something from T. S. Eliot (Or Tess Elihoo, as he pronounced it), like Time present and time past or that quotation from Gertrude Stein you are so fond of. (Did I tell you it sounded like Get tru Stem?)
& Life is the continuation of death by other means. (Or vie se reversa, I said.)
& A life is nothing more than one half of a parenthesis waiting anxiously for the other half. We can put off the Great Arrival (or the Second Coming, as you would call it, Silver B. Yeats) only by opening up other parentheses in the middle: by creative work, by sport or by study—or by that Great Parenthesis, sex. (That’s where your Second Coming should really come, I said. He laughed.) This is the orthography of life: Silvestre Isla (1929— ). The second act is first a cipher, a void, then nothingness.
& Death is the great leveler: the bulldozer of God. (Or the bullgoader of Oz, said I. What about the Goddozer of bull?)
& The invisible tiger, as the Burmese call it. For me it is an invisible vehicle not a tiger. My invisible convertible. Someday I’m going to crash into It or It is going to run me over or I will throw myself out of It down Eternal road, 100 mph.
Do you know the Tale of the Long-haired Boy and the Bald Woman, La Pelona, which is Cuban for death? It is a Creole version of Appointment in Samarra. A long-haired Boy was walking along main street when he saw Death but She didn’t see him. Then he heard her saying, Ise gonna get me a long-haired boy today. He rushed into the nearest barber’s shop and said to the barber, Shave it all off! He went back to the street feeling very cool, what with his head shaved to the skin and the evening breeze. Death, who had been searching up and down for a boy with long hair all day long and was simply dead tired, said when she saw the boy who had had his head shaved, O.K., so Ise not goin’ to find me a long-haired boy, I’ll grab hole of this skinhead instade!
Moral: All men are mortal, but some men are more mortal than others.
& Freud forgot the wise remark of that other Jew, Solomon: sex is not the only engine that drives a man between life and death. There is another, vanity. Life (and that other life which is called history) has been driven further by the wheel of vanity than by the piston of sex.
& Ortega (José Ortega y Gasset, not Domingo Ortega) said, I am myself and also my circumstance. (A Jew would say, I said, I am myself and my circumcision.)
& Evil men always win: it was Abel who was the first loser.
& It is not necessarily true that God supports local evil when there are more bad guys than good guys. It is rather that one baddy is equal to a crowd of goodies.
& It is better to be the victim than the executioner.
& Rine says, putting everything on stage as usual, that evil doesn’t know how to organize a plot, that evil people can always make a magnificent first act, a good second act, but that they always break down in the third act. It’s like a version of boy meets girl/boy loses girl/boy finds girl of one’s life. The baddies always come to dust in a play by Shakespeare—in the fourth or fifth acts. But what happens to one-act lives?
& Vices are more convincing than virtues: we find Ahab more credible than Billy Budd.
& Good is afraid of evil, but evil laughs at good.
& Hell may be paved with good intentions, but everything else in it (its topography, architecture and decoration) is made of bad intentions. And hell’s not just a cold-water flat, you know. (Try reading Dante’s Inferno as a textbook in town planning: S.)
& Evil is the last resort of Good. (And vicious versa, a very low, drunken voice made itself said.)
& Yes, evil is the continuation of good by other methods. (And vice hiccup!)
Aren’t we back to where we started?
(I don’t know nor will we ever know, because at this point I got tired of being a Plato for this Socrates.)
XII
I was looking at the fish tank. There were a number of anonymous little fish which I didn’t see because the ray kept swimming around and around incessant, obsessive, ghostlike, its sick white face lighting up as it reached its hideout between the stones. Then it would disappear in the dark stagnant water and reappear once more, always moving, never stopping for a moment. I thought it was cruel treatment but it wasn’t surprising since it was only a fish. It is a devilfish Captain Cuésteau had said. He also informed me that they never lived longer than a month in captivity, not even in big pools, like sharks, which refuse to swim and run aground, to die of suffocation. One of the absurdities of nature, a fish that drowns. Neither sharks nor rays are fish, lectured Cuélinnaeus. I thanked him for this information about the life cycle of the ray, and he said you’re welcome. Was I? What about the cruel sojourn of the ray in its mortal pool, was it welcome? He didn’t say because I had forgotten Kuérkegaard the next minute and was remembering Count Dracula instead, the unforgettable Bela Lugosi, whose image I saw superimposed on the devilfish flapping his great mantle, covering his weird ghostly features with a cloak, obsessively traveling to and fro between the shadows and the dazzling glare of the aquarium (We will be leaving tomorrow evening), and I also saw beautiful ill-fated Carol Borland in The Mark of the Vampire, costarring with old Bela (Bela and La Belle, as Bustrófedon would say), him going through a Romanesque cobweb (The spider is spinning its vebb for the unvary fly) descending the Baroque staircase and stopping for a century at a peaceful Gothick window to watch over the victim who was sleeping promiscuously between Romantic curtains on an Art Nouveau sofa, and without giving a moment’s reflection to this mad mixture of styles (Dracula, despite appearances to the contrary, is not an interior decorator) throwing himself on that deliciously tempting neck: that promised land of white flesh, that walking blood bank, that object of grief and love that would have given such pleasure to our Divine Markiss sitting on his nail-studded seat in the Charenton theater, enormous, bloated and greedy, drinking sangría (I never drink . . . wine) and eating gobbets of raw liver as though they were pink popcorn, and then as the devilfish flashes back again through his submarine cathedral I see the doubly immortal Lugosi terrified for all his infinite wickedness by a little crucifix and in the same memoryshot I see my young uncle who had once in a sudden fit of blasphemous rage broken his r
osary and stamped on it and hurled it into the patio during a family quarrel one evening and later, at midnight, when he returned from the movies, where he had seen The Vampire, he was wandering around the patio like the Mad Doctor with a lamp in his hand, like a hunchbacked Christian Diogenes who only comes out at night, looking for the crucifix all over the orb of the orchard and he didn’t go to sleep until he had found it and that dark night nothing happened in the patio, upon which I kept a close vigil with my eyes wide open peering over the blankets, watching for any ghostly sheets, but even if some evil creature had gone past I wouldn’t have seen it since it was as dark as any night in the country when there is no moon, but when the moon is full and the Marifasa Lupina Lumina in flower, the werewolf comes to sow terror in London and steals along a gallery, a long corridor illuminated by the moon, and every time the shadow of a column falls on his face he grows more like a wolf and less like a man (an ingenious idea they used in movies before they perfected the fadeout-cum-reversed-makeup, the trick they used to transform Creighton Chaney into Lone Chaney, Jr., a lupine actor) and then he runs off ferociously through the garden speeding across it like an erratic arrow, leaping over hedges and running across fields and through some ghost-pale trees to a fatal clearing in the wood au clair de lune fatale, where he meets Nina Foch, and attacks and kills her. Did he rape her first? Or afterward? Did he flee, potent for killing, impotent even for kissing? Children don’t know. The adult can think of these myths as fantasies of impotence, following the King Kong tradition which requires that the monster must always carry off the heroine but then afterward he doesn’t know what to do with her, except to spend the whole content of his powder keg of love in the salvos of his sighs. The child, that child who looks like me sometimes, sits there suffering a delicious torture and sees nothing but the beautiful, white lifeless body of Nina Foch. No, not Nina Foch, no, because Nina is also a wolf, a wolf-woman, a she-wolf, CaNina Fox, a vulpine actress, just as the delectable, tiny, easy-to-fondle Simone Simon is the leopard-lady who stalks silently around the heated pool in the gymnasium/gynaeceum, and savagely slashes her rival’s bathrobe on the edge of the swimming pool and makes the swinging doors echo her invisible presence walking past the lockers and up the stairs, where I fixed her forever: black and savage and utterly catlike: with fire blazing from her eyes all the better to seduce Kent Smith and foaming at the mouth, a mouth that is entirely full of fangs and bestial breath all the better to kiss Kent Smith and with her well-manicured claws all the better to caress, caressing, scratching, digging into, tearing to pieces and rending apart the enamored soul and aroused body of poor Kent Smith who never went down the spiral staircase, and it’s a crying shame and a shying crime against nature that this lovely gamine Simone should feel such feline urges, as it is also a dreadful misfortune that the poor little Mexican girl in The Leopard Man (1943), besides being so poor, has to go out in the dark night of the border on an errand and when she is almost safely back home, after wandering terrified and all alone through the deserted streets of Tijuana, followed by those stealthy footsteps which get closer and closer and she walks faster and faster and faster and then she breaks into a run and runs and runs and arrives at her house and knocks and knocks and nobody opens, like in a nightmare, and the stalking footsteps turn into a black and overwhelmingly evil presence, and the Beast ‘43 destroys her in front of the closed door, with no sense of justice at all as the poor are more mortal than the rich, and the traces of this hideous crime are left on the door, the shy blood of the innocent little girl trickling down the uneven hinges while the Beast runs off treacherously through the film night, his black evil camouflaged by the somber sets and the subtitles, and when I went to the Actualidades on July 21, 1944, there were eight or ten people sitting in separate parts of the hall, but little by little, without us noticing it, we began to move together in a group and by the middle of the film we were a tight cluster of bulging eyes and clenched fists and shattered nerves, rooted to the spot and united by the delights of the ready-made terror of the movies, like when I saw The Thing in the Radiocine on January 3, 1947, and the same thing happened, except that it was a different kind of terror that I felt, that we felt, that the group of us felt as we huddled together in the stalls, a terror which I know now is not just atavistic but a real, almost political terror, and which starts right at the beginning when the aviators and actors and audience, all of us together, are so reckless as to try and measure the object that had fallen from the sky and buried itself in the ice, remaining there for all to see in the fish tank, behind the polar glass, and all of us were standing around it, around its edges, and they saw, we saw, I saw, that it was round, that it looked like a platter, a scary saucer, that it was, yes, you’ve guessed it: a ship from outer space. THEM!