City

by Alessandro Baricco

  It was precisely at this point that Prof. Mondrian Kilroy started vomiting. He was sitting in the third row, and he started vomiting.

  Apart from weeping—something that he did often now and with a certain pleasure—Prof. Mondrian Kilroy had begun to vomit from time to time, and this, too, had to do with his research and in particular with an essay he had written which, oddly, he termed “the definitive and redeeming refutation of whatever I have written, write, or will write.” In fact it was a very special essay. Mondrian Kilroy had worked on it for fourteen years, without ever taking a note. Then one day, when he was shut in a pornvideo booth where, by pressing numbered keys, you could choose among 212 different programs, he understood that he had understood, and he left the booth, grabbed a brochure that listed the prices of the “contact room,” and on the back wrote the essay. He wrote it right there, standing at the cashier’s counter. It didn’t take more than two minutes: the essay consisted of a series of six brief theses. The longest was no more than five lines. Then he returned to the booth, because he still had three minutes of paid-for viewing left, and he didn’t want to waste them. He pushed the buttons at random. When he ended up with a gay video, he was irritated.

  It may seem surprising, but the essay in question did not have to do with Prof. Mondrian Kilroy’s favorite subject, that is, curved objects. No. To stick to the facts: the essay was entitled:

  ESSAY ON INTELLECTUAL HONESTY

  Poomerang, who was a great admirer of it and knew it practically by heart, had once summed up the contents like this:

  If a bank robber goes to jail, why do intellectuals roam free?

  It should be said that, with banks, Poomerang had a “suspense account” (the phrase was Shatzy’s, she found it ingenious). He hated banks, even though it wasn’t clear why. At one time, he had undertaken an educational campaign against the excessive use of ATM machines. Along with Diesel and Gould he was constantly chewing gum, and he would stick the gum, still warm, on the keypad of an automatic teller machine. Usually he put it on the 5. People would go up to the machine, and right as they were entering their secret code they would notice the gum. If they didn’t need the number 5 they would keep going, paying careful attention to where they put their finger. If their code had a 5 they panicked. The anguished need for money had to do battle with the revulsion at the chewed gum. Some tried to remove the sticky substance; they used all types of objects. Usually they ended up plastering the whole screen. A minority gave up and left. Sad to say, most people swallowed hard and then hit the number, their finger on the gum. Once Diesel saw an unfortunate woman who had three 5s in a row in her secret code. She hit the first with great dignity, and on the second her mouth was weirdly contorted. On the third she started vomiting.

  In this connection: the first thesis of the Essay on Intellectual Honesty went like this:

  Men have ideas.

  “Clever,” remarked Shatzy.

  “It’s only the beginning, Miss Shell. And then, careful, it’s not at all obvious. Someone like Kant, for instance, wouldn’t let it pass so easily.”

  “Kant?”

  “He’s a German.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do I wash here, too?”

  “Let me see.”

  Every so often, when they washed the trailer, Prof. Mondrian Kilroy joined them. After the business of the Vancouver purée, he and Gould had become friends. And the professor liked the others a lot, too, Shatzy, the giant and the mute. They talked while they washed. One of their favorite topics was the Essay on Intellectual Honesty. It engaged them.

  Men have ideas.

  Prof. Mondrian Kilroy said that ideas are like galaxies of little intuitions, a confused thing, he declared, which is continually changing and is essentially useless for practical purposes. They are beautiful, that’s all, they are beautiful. But they are a mess. Ideas, in their pure state, are a marvelous mess. They are provisional apparitions of infinity , he said. “Clear and distinct” ideas, he added, are an invention of Descartes, are a fraud, clear ideas do not exist, ideas are obscure by definition, if you have a clear idea, it’s not an idea.

  “Then what is it?”

  “Thesis No. 2, kids.”

  Thesis No. 2 went like this:

  Men express ideas.

  Here’s the trouble, said Prof. Mondrian Kilroy. When you express an idea you give it a coherence that it did not originally possess. Somehow you have to give it a form that is organized, and concise, and comprehensible to others. As long as you limit yourself to thinking it, the idea can remain the marvelous mess that it is. But when you decide to express it you begin to discard one thing, to summarize something else, to simplify this and cut that, to put it in order, by imposing a certain logic: you work on it a bit, and in the end you have something that people can understand. A “clear and distinct” idea. At first you try to do this in a responsible way: you try not to throw away too much, you’d like to preserve the whole infinity of the idea you had in your head. You try. But they don’t give you time, they are on you, they want to know, they attack you.

  “They who?”

  “The others, all the others.”

  “For example?”

  “People. People. You express an idea and people listen. And want to understand. Or, even worse, they want to know if it’s right or wrong. It’s a perversion.”

  “What are they supposed to do? Swallow it and that’s the end?”

  “I don’t know what they’re supposed to do, but I know what they do, and for you, who had an idea, and are now trying to express it, it’s like being attacked. With impressive velocity you think only of how to make it as compact and strong as possible, to withstand the attack, so that it comes out alive, and, using all your intelligence, you strive to make it an unassailable system, and the better you succeed the less you realize that what you’re doing, what you’re really doing at that moment, is losing touch, little by little but with impressive velocity, with the origin of your idea, with the marvelous instinctive infinite mess that was your idea, and you’re doing this for the sole, sad purpose of expressing it, that is, of establishing it in such a way that it is strong and coherent and refined enough to withstand the shock wave of the surrounding world, the objections, the obtuse faces of those who don’t understand, the telephone call from the head of your department who . . .”

  “It’s getting cold, Professor.”

  Often they talked about it while they ate, because Prof. Mondrian Kilroy liked pizza the way Shatzy made it, and so, especially on Saturdays, they ate pizza. Which, cold, was inedible.

  Men express ideas.

  But they are no longer ideas, Prof. Mondrian Kilroy burst out. They are the detritus of ideas, arranged in masterly fashion to become solid objects, perfect mechanisms, instruments of war. They are artificial ideas. They have only a distant relationship with that marvelous and infinite mess in which they began, an almost imperceptible relationship, like a faint perfume. In reality they are now plastic, artificial stuff, with no relation to the truth, mere gadgets to make a good show in public. Which, according to him, led logically to Thesis No. 3. Which went like this:

  Men express ideas that are not theirs.

  “Are you joking?”

  “I’m totally serious.”

  “How do they express ideas that are not theirs?”

  “Let’s say that they are no longer theirs. They were. But they very quickly slip out of control and become artificial creatures that develop almost autonomously, and they have a single objective: to survive. Man lends them his intelligence and they use it to become ever more solid and precise. In a certain sense, human intelligence is constantly working to dissipate the marvelous infinite chaos of original ideas and replace it with the stainless perfection of artificial ideas. They were apparitions: they are now objects: and man takes hold of them, and knows them perfectly, but would be unable to say where they came from and, finally, what possible relationship they now have to the truth. In a certain sense i
t doesn’t even matter to him any more. They function, they withstand attack, they succeed in dissecting the weaknesses of others, they almost never break: why should he rock the boat? Man looks at them, discovers the pleasure of holding them, using them, seeing them in action. Sooner or later, inevitably, he learns that one can fight with them. He had never thought of that before. They were apparitions: he had thought only of making others see them. But in time: nothing of the original desire survives. They were apparitions: man has made them into weapons.”

  This was the part that Shatzy liked best. They were apparitions: man has made them into weapons.

  “You know what I often think, Professor?”

  “Tell me, Miss Shell.”

  “Gunfighters, you know, the gunfighters of the West?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, they were fantastic shots, and they knew everything about their guns, but if you think about it, well: none of them would have known how to make a gun. You see?”

  “Go on.”

  “I mean: it’s one thing to use a weapon, another to invent it, or produce it.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t know what it means, but I often think about it.”

  “You’re doing very well, Miss Shell.”

  “You think so?”

  “I’m absolutely certain.”

  On the other hand, Gould, if you think about it, look what happens in a man’s head when he expresses an idea and someone standing before him raises an objection. Do you think that that man has the time, or the honesty, to return to the apparition that was the long-ago origin of that idea and check back, to see if the objection is reasonable? He will never do it. It is much easier to refine the artificial idea now in his possession in such a way that it can withstand the objection and maybe move to the offensive, and attack, in turn, the objection. What does respect for the truth have to do with all this? Nothing. This is a duel. They are establishing who is the stronger. They don’t want to use other weapons, because they don’t know how to: they use ideas. It may seem that the point of all this is to elucidate the truth, but in reality what both of them want is to establish who is the stronger. It’s a duel. They may seem like brilliant intellectuals, but they are animals who are defending their territory, they are fighting over a female, they are hunting for food. Listen to me, Gould: you will never find anything more savage and more primitive than two intellectuals dueling. Anything more dishonest.

  Years later, after everything was over and there was nothing to be done about it, Shatzy and Prof. Mondrian Kilroy met by chance in a train station. It was a long time since they had seen each other. They went to have a drink and talked about the university, and about what Shatzy was doing, and about the fact that the professor had stopped teaching. It was clear that he would have liked to be able to talk about Gould, and what had happened to him, but it was too difficult. At a certain point they were silent, and only then did Prof. Mondrian Kilroy say

  “It’s funny, but what I think about that boy is that he is the only honest person I’ve met, in all my life. He was an honest boy. Do you believe me?”

  Shatzy nodded her head yes, and thought that maybe that was the heart of the matter, and that everything fell into place if only one made the effort to remember that Gould, above all else, was an honest genius.

  Then, at the end, the professor stood up and, before he left, embraced Shatzy, a little awkwardly, but hard.

  “Don’t pay any attention if I cry, I’m not sad, I’m not sad for Gould.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s that I often cry. That’s all.”

  “Don’t worry, Professor, I like people who cry.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Seriously. I’ve always liked them.”

  They never saw each other again, after that.

  Anyway, Thesis No. 3 (Men express ideas that are not theirs) was followed, with a certain logic, by Thesis No. 4. Which went like this:

  Ideas, once they have been expressed and therefore subjected to public pressure, become artificial objects lacking a true relationship with their origin. Men refine them so ingeniously that they become lethal. In time men discover that they can be used as weapons. They don’t think about it for a moment. And they fire.

  “Grand,” said Shatzy.

  “Rather long, but it came to me long, I still have to work on it,” Prof. Mondrian Kilroy declared.

  “I think it could even go just like this: Ideas: they were apparitions, now they are weapons.”

  “Perhaps a little compressed, don’t you think?”

  “You mean?”

  “You see, it’s a tragedy, a real tragedy. One must beware of summarizing it in a few words.”

  “A tragedy?”

  The professor chewed his pizza and nodded. He really was convinced that it was a tragedy. He had even thought of giving the Essay a subtitle, and the subtitle would have been: Analysis of a necessary tragedy. Then he decided that subtitles are repulsive, like white socks or gray loafers. Only the Japanese wear gray loafers. It was possible, however, that they had eye trouble, and were absolutely convinced that their loafers were brown. In that case it would be imperative to warn them of their mistake.

  You know, Gould, it’s taken years to resign myself to the evidence. I didn’t want to believe it. On paper the relationship with the truth is so beautiful—unique, inimitable—and the magic of ideas, magnificent apparitions of the confused infinite in your mind . . . How is it possible that men choose to renounce all that, to deny it, and agree to mess around with insignificant, artificial little ideas—little marvels of intellectual engineering, for goodness’ sake—but in the end trinkets, pathetic trinkets, masterpieces of rhetoric and logical acrobatics, but trinkets, in the end, gadgets, and all this just because of an uncontrollable taste for fighting ? I couldn’t believe it, I thought there must be something behind it, something that had escaped me, and yet, in the end, I had to admit that it was all very simple, and inevitable, and even comprehensible, if only you could overcome your repugnance and look at the matter from close up, very close up, even if it disgusts you, try to see it from close up. Take a person who lives on ideas, a professional, say, a scholar, a scholar of something, OK? He must have begun out of passion, surely he began because he had talent, he was one of those who have apparitions of the infinite, let’s imagine that he had had such apparitions as a young man, and was awestruck by them. He must have tried to write them down, first maybe he talked with someone, then one day he must have thought he would be able to write them, and he started out, with the best intentions, and he wrote, though he knew that he would succeed in conveying only the tiniest portion of the infinity in his head, but believing that he would have time later to deepen the discussion, to explain himself better, to set it all down properly. He writes, and people read. People he doesn’t even know search him out to learn more, others invite him to conferences where they can attack him, he defends himself, expounds, corrects, attacks in turn, begins to recognize a small band that is on his side and an alliance of enemies that wants to destroy him: he begins to exist, Gould. He doesn’t have time to realize this but he is inspired, he likes the struggle, he discovers what it means to enter a classroom under the adoring gaze of the students, he sees respect in the eyes of ordinary people, he is surprised at his desire to attract the hatred of some famous person, and in the end seeks it out, gains it, maybe three lines in a footnote in a book on something else, but they are three lines that drip with rancor, he is smart enough to quote them in an interview with some journal in the field, and a few weeks later, in a newspaper, he finds himself labeled as the adversary of the famous professor, there is even a photograph, in the paper, a picture of him, he sees a picture of himself in a newspaper, and many others see it, too, it’s a gradual thing but with every passing day he and his artificial idea become a single entity that makes its way in the world, the idea is like the carburetor, and he is the engine, they make their way together, and it’s some
thing, Gould, that he never imagined, you must understand this clearly, he didn’t expect all this to happen, he didn’t even want it, in truth, but now it has happened, and he exists in his artificial idea, an idea that gets farther and farther away from the original apparition of the infinite, having been serviced a thousand times to stand up to attacks, an artificial idea, solid and permanent, already tested, without which the scholar would immediately cease to exist and would be swallowed up again in the swamp of ordinary existence. Put like that, it doesn’t even seem too serious—to be swallowed up again in the swamp of ordinary existence—and for years I couldn’t grasp the gravity of it, but the secret is to get even closer, an even closer look, I know it’s revolting, but you’ve got to follow me there, Gould, hold your nose and come look, this scholar, this scholar had a father, look at him even closer, a harsh father, stupidly harsh, who for years was intent on crushing his son, making him feel the weight of his constant and blatant inadequacy, and he does this up until the day he sees his son’s name in a newspaper, printed in a newspaper, it doesn’t matter why, the fact is that his friends start saying Congratulations, I saw your son in the paper, it’s revolting, right?, but he is impressed, and the son finds what he never had the power to find, that is, a belated revenge, and this is tremendous, to be able to look your father in the eye, there is no price for revenge like this, what does it mean to fool around with your ideas a little, forgetful of any connection with their origin, when you are finally able to be the son of your father, the properly authorized and approved son? No price is too high to pay for the respect of your father, believe me, nor, if you think about it, for the freedom that our scholar finds in money, his first real money, which a professorship at a second-rate university begins to put in his pockets, removing him from the daily grind of poverty and guiding him along the inclined plane of small luxuries that at last—finally, in the end—leads to the longed-for house on the hill, with study and library: a mere nothing, in theory, but tremendous, actually, when, in an article by yet another journalist, it shows up as the scholar’s private refuge, where he finds a haven from the scintillating life that besieges him, a life more imaginary than not, but, as displayed against the reality of his shelter, it is true, and therefore impressed in the mind of the public, which from that moment will have a regard for the scholar that he can no longer do without, because it is a regard that, by abstaining from any sort of verification, gives, a priori, respect and eminence and impunity. You can do without it when you don’t know it. But afterwards? When you have seen it in the eyes of your neighbor on the beach, and of the man who sells you a car, and of the publisher you would never even have dreamed of knowing, and of the television actress and—once, in the mountains—of the Cabinet secretary, in person? Nauseating, right? Rather, it means we’re close to the heart of things. No pity, Gould. It’s not the moment to give in. You can get even closer. The wife. The wife of the scholar, the girl next door since the age of twelve, he’s always loved her, married her almost automatically, as a legitimate defense against the neglect of destiny, a faded, sympathetic wife without passion, a good wife, the wife now of a successful professor and his deadly artificial idea, a wife happy to the core, look at her carefully. When she wakes up. When she gets out of the bath. Look at her. The bathrobe, everything. Look at her. And then look at him, the scholar, a man on the short side, with a sad smile, flaking dandruff, not that there’s anything wrong, but flaking dandruff, beautiful hands, yes, pale slender hands that unfailingly cup his chin in the photographs, beautiful hands, the rest pitiful, you must make an effort, Gould, and try to see him naked, a man like that, it’s important to see him naked, believe me, white and soft, with flabby muscles and, in the middle of his groin, nothing to be proud of, what chances, in the daily struggle, can a male animal like that have for mating?, very few and very modest, no way around it, and that would be the case, in fact, if not for the artificial idea, which has transformed an animal headed for the slaughter into a fighter, and even, in the long run, the pack leader, who carries a leather briefcase and adds an artistic fake limp, and who now, if you look carefully, walks down the steps of the university and is accosted by a student, a girl, who shyly introduces herself and, talking, bumps along with him to the street and then down the slippery slope of a friendship that gets more and more intimate, it’s disgusting just to think about, but so useful to contemplate, thoroughly, however revolting it may be, so useful to study, to grasp in all its details, down to the final triumph in her apartment, a rented room with a big bed and a Peruvian bedspread, he gets there, with his briefcase and his dandruff, on the excuse of correcting a bibliography, and through hours of laborious disguised courtship strips away the girl’s resistance with the forceps and scalpel of his artificial idea, and, thanks to a little column that for some weeks he’s had in a weekly, he finds the courage, and in a certain sense the right, to lay a hand, one of his beautiful hands, on this girl’s skin, skin that no destiny would ever have allotted him but which his artificial idea now offers up, together with the unbuttoned blouse, the tongue illogically parting his thin gray lips, the feminine breath panting in his ear, and the dazzling glimpse of a tanned, beautiful young hand tight around his sex. Incredible. You think there’s a price, for all this? There isn’t, Gould. You think that that man would ever be able to give all this up on the mere formality of being honest, of respecting the infinity of his ideas, of going back to ask what is true and what isn’t? Do you think it will ever occur to that man to wonder, even in secret, even in absolute, impenetrable solitude, if his artificial idea still has anything to do with the truth, with its origins? No. (Thesis No. 5: “Men use ideas as weapons, and in doing so they detach themselves from the ideas forever.”) He is by now too far away from the point where he started, and it has been too long since he inhabited his ideas, in honesty, simplicity and peace. You can’t reconstruct that sort of honesty once your betrayal of it has given you an existence, an entire existence, you who would not have been able to exist, would have gone on for years until you dropped dead. You don’t give back an entire life, after stealing it from destiny, just because one day you look at yourself in the mirror and are disgusted. Our professor will die dishonest, but at least he will die having lived.