With his parents anxious that he should study, Raul was forced to fake it. At night he would have to move quietly and lower his voice to a whisper, since they insisted he get his sleep. He found that he couldn’t read; no novel held his interest. Writing was also impossible: he wished one could verbally express a scream. He felt he was in an ever diminishing cage, his inner rage at the restriction. Senseless values were cutting off all that was vital to him. The nearest he came to a personal identity was being angry at these jailers.
There was no attitude he could take that didn’t fit nicely into their conception of an adolescent. So consistent and determined was this condescension that Raul felt he could easily throw them all into one box and label it Them. They. You people. He hated everyone now.
The black prince rode again in Raul’s poetry. At night Raul would turn the lights off and sing of the avenging man at the beach. The spray of the sea on him, dawn breaking above him. The swirl of the sea and the sky, his cape fluttering in the wind.
Only this lonely figure calmed him. Brief, cool peace. He wanted solitude. He wanted something mysterious and sublime from the earth and from his talent. He knew his identity: he wished its means and recognition.
Perhaps these desires had never been more infused with egotism. He could not allow even the slightest condescension, and it came now from all sides. Never failing to hit their mark, all authorities knifed him with their arrogance and maddening irrelevancy.
Even the well-intentioned blundered stupidly. Miller, Bowden, and White all found convenient clichés to convince Raul; nothing could repel him more. As for Henderson’s promises, their influence had weakened considerably. Alexander and his course were no longer attractive. With the loss of Iago, and the knowledge that Miller would not do Shakespeare in later years, the theater’s value disappeared. Yet the lure of a scholarly life couched in ease by Henderson’s energetic liberalism was strong enough to keep him at the school.
12.
All this bred a frantic inner life for Raul. He violently withdrew from contact with others. He practiced silence in school, speaking only when it was impossible to do otherwise. Creating a mystique, he recognized people only when he had translated them into this code. He tried to burrow deeply within himself and snugly bed down for the cold winter.
His world ranged in imagery from the lonely to the bitter. He pumped his mind with poetry, surviving the day by relating the commonplace to an image. But he could not live this way. His life barely had direction before this, but it had had joy, and that was gone. The routine refined a system that gradually ate away at his patience and sanity. So much activity with so little importance or interest infuriated him. He needed time, to stay sane, if for nothing else.
He had read nothing for months, and the juicy paperbacks that lined the walk of his room cried out against this neglect. For days he would pick one out, open it, and, being preoccupied, leave it with barely a page read. The idiocy of all those who advised him had blocked the entrances to those doors that harbored time and thought of his own. The constriction was as precise as in chess: hardly visible. His poetry became ridiculous, expressing an oppression that called for a treatise, not imagery.
His impotence against his oppressors, an impotence that included an inability to prove the oppression, subsided to self-hate. He saw his floppy arms and legs, his gawky manner. He masturbated each night, leaving the evidence pressing against his body for weeks. He found no limits to make himself more contemptible; and knowing the cause of his self-hate increased it. Impotent furor at his impotence: the circle in which his emotions were bound knew no escape. If he confessed to all this, he would be told he was the one who was sick. He wanted, and needed, his own life style; and suddenly, as if it had gone on too long, as if he had been pushed too far, he reared back and began spring cleaning.
Wednesday night of one of the last weeks, Raul opened Dreiser’s The Financier and began reading. Thursday morning, taking a collection of notebooks and old poems, he went on. A little rest Thursday night, and, taking Dreiser’s Titan, he read and revitalized his poems. The air in Van Cortlandt Park was breezy, soft, and vital. The days were graceful, the freedom sweeter for being stolen, and the cost terrible.
His friends, meeting him at Mike & Gino’s, looked at him wide-eyed. Jeff, in a frightened whisper, told him that Tom Able was telling Raul’s teachers where he was. Raul smiled and said, “That’s what he’s taught to do.”
He decided to go downtown early Friday afternoon and, passing through the subway cars, he saw his history teacher. He nodded at him and went on.
Perhaps the frank way Raul cut school for those two days caused the relative calm with which it was met by his parents and the school. His brother didn’t even feel a man- to-man talk was necessary. For once, the usual run of complaints aroused no guilt. Fucking up? Why, he had read two novels and completed twelve poems. The money? His father, but for his pride, could get a scholarship; they were based on need, not excellence; his sanity was worth more than the tuition.
The school asked that Raul see Henderson, rather than White, on Monday. Though this was preferable, Raul would feel guilty with him, and therefore more vulnerable. Due mostly to his parents, though they did not encourage him to stay in school, by Monday Raul’s calm had fled and he wished desperately to stay.
His appointment with Henderson was in the afternoon, and he spent the morning with Jeff. After a class, Jeff and he walked off the school grounds to have a cigarette. They followed a wooded road that led to the rear of the school grounds. Rounding a corner, a car came sharply to a halt. Henderson was in it.
“Jeff! Raul! Get in here.”
They threw their cigarettes on the ground, pressing them out. Raul shook his head. “Oh boy,” he said.
They got into the back seat. Henderson started the car. “Do either of you have classes?”
“No,” Raul said. “I have a study hall now.”
Jeff, very nervous, outlined his entire morning schedule.
Henderson merely grunted his recognition. “I was just driving to school,” he said, stopping in irritation. “And I find you two. I hope you’re not lying to me, and you do have no classes.”
They mumbled no. The statement required no denial; Henderson was pointing out how far they had breached his trust.
The car stopped in the faculty parking lot. “Go up to my office,” Henderson said. “I’ll be up there in a few minutes.”
A few students looked on in surprise at seeing Raul and Jeff get out of Henderson’s car. Raul, because of the stage and his cutting, was known; they were piecing it together. Jeff and he hurried up the stairs as if they were being chased. Jeff, in a tense whisper, asked Raul, “What’s he gonna do?”
Raul shrugged. He didn’t like Henderson’s tone. It was White’s, or his father’s, or any blundering authoritarian trying to establish his perishable superiority. Raul’s arrogance was clearly saying: Watch out, Henderson baby, you may blow it.
Henderson’s secretary, seeing Raul and Jeff hurrying into his office and knowing that both of them had appointments later in the day, realized something was wrong. “Did Mr. Henderson ask you to go to his office?” she asked softly.
Jeff mumbled and nodded, Raul not stopping.
Henderson, seeing a member of the faculty in the parking lot, went up to him, asking that he not mention Raul and Jeff being in his car to anyone. Reaching his office, he asked his secretary to get Raul’s and Jeff’s folders. He stood in his outer office, trying to control an anger that arose from terrible frustration. Raul and Jeff had done nothing unusual. Students often walked that road to smoke. But his leniency had made the practice more frequent. The students, seniors in particular, had been taking advantage of him, loading the guns of those faculty and parents who opposed him.