ANATOMY (Iulus)
Their friendship had taken on the solidarity of those you grow up with, when there are no secrets. Tiring of alluding to the other by their professions, but unable to move to a first-name basis, they took the nicknames my mother gave them — Scipio and Berganza — from an early Spanish play about two dogs who are always fighting, taking each other by the throat and flinging the other about, but nevertheless inseparable. Wandering astray through the countryside, they occupied themselves chiefly in playing pranks on their unfortunate fellows, chained to a post or locked in their kennels, “always hunting, but unstained with gore.”
They used these affectionate nicknames only when making the most serious of points, clinching an argument, or utterly destroying the other’s most cherished beliefs, though it must be said that Father on his own territory got the better of these, a victory he would one day pay for. The Professor, to his credit, was never afraid of being helpless or at a loss for words in my father’s presence; nor was my father fearful of challenging everything he said, even down to his reading of the weather. It was refreshing for Father to be in the presence of a personality which could not be easily intimidated. They could never let on to their families how much difficulty they were in, and were delighted to find in each other a use for the paternal melancholy they used to batter every convention. They never returned from their training sessions in the fields without boyish catches in the throat, indicating that you consider your best friend insane, but refuse on principle to call the fact to the world’s attention. You could see it glistening on their faces, whether the dogs did well or not, the sense that underneath everything, they had behaved perfectly.
Whenever the Professor arrived, as soon as the requisite papers had been destroyed, he and Father would move off in the victoria with the best trotters and dogs. Occasionally I would stay with Mother; however, on most occasions, I was invited to accompany them on their “rambles,” a word my father abhorred as it implied a chatty English excursion in a fine rain to an unremarkable prospect, a kind of contrived masochism which could only be palliated by a formal dinner beneath a tent with servants in the evening. The Professor would remove his hat, allowing the sun to color his face while he complained of long hours, the unbelievable stupidity of his patients, and the general ingratitude of the world. Everyone needs one friend with whom he can be totally sarcastic and bitter, and Father was aware that his was always in some kind of severe physical discomfort.
“I am not what I was,” he would conclude, and Father would pop the reins, jerking back his confrere’s large pale head in rather too obvious a therapy, for my father’s belief was that no one saw anything clearly — that you were not even in this world — unless your heart’s systole was over 160. Thus he would alternate jupes, jogs, harsh trots, and thundering canters until the Professor acknowledged that he could feel bubbles of energy rising from his pelvis to his ailing heart, better than any digitalis at making the brain pink again.
Here my memory falters, as it will when the subject is the falling out of fast friends, for friendship is a steady state in which all theories are held in abeyance, and the after-the-fact is never envisioned. For my father, the Professor was the childhood sidekick he never had, and in return he brought out both the adventurer and the keen observer in the Professor, so locked in the mire of family, city, and profession. Father brought him back into the world, and more than once when they were standing in the fields he quoted the great Goethe to him in the vernacular: “Quit squinting at the heavens, man. Stand firm and look around you!”
Father also understood his boon companion enough to know this was a man who would find what he was looking for, despite all odds and contradictions, and their friendship depended on him, their forays appearing wholly spontaneous. The Professor’s fascination with my father was that he could not but admire a man who loved his culture, meager as it was, and pressed it to his breast, extracting from his environment every ounce of reinforcement, like a cellist who practices all day and receives so much feedback that he rarely feels the impulse to perform, and lives easily to one hundred.
Only one thing didn’t quite reach Papa’s rich and benevolent skepticism, and that was in noticing that our region, which had sprung up where a dozen tongues and civilizations had clashed, had been created out of the wind and would disappear into it. Our culture, if one could call it that, was not like a horse, which you could pick up positively with your will and put right down again at the front of the race. He spent his life amazed that the Enlightenment his family had brought to the frontier did not take root anywhere, that in Cannonia rights and obligations never moved together.
While he was fully prepared to be the last of his kind, and I suppose took pleasure from it, the rankling question of the breeder still remained. Without rigid controls nothing gets passed on, yet to break the deadlock of mediocrity required something of a revolution. These questions were uppermost in his banter with the Professor about religion, which was something of a soft spot, as you might expect.
“You’re no Jew, Berganza,” he often giggled, “just a Calvinist with a sense of irony.” Add to that his derision of all things German in the clearest and the most precise Hochdeutsch, his love of tradition and contemptuous dismissal of it in the same breath, as well as his distinctly Protestant contribution to Jewish advice — that there is no such thing as a symbol, that depth is just as illusory as surface, that you can make more money selling advice than following it.
Of course, I took my cues from the dogs, for when danger threatens, dogs run away without apology. I had no theory, I didn’t question motives, I made my shifting alliances as best I could. Consistent in my friendliness and friendlessness, I didn’t differentiate. I went to those who were kindest to me, who fed me. I would form new bonds but I was always looking for a better master, so I tended to like everyone.
Eventually the day came when Father’s savage debates with the Professor became subsumed not by discretion, friendship, or even exhaustion, but by having generated such wild analogies that they might as well have been speaking in tongues — though they showed no embarrassment at Mother’s yawning or my own, or at the fact that people moved away from them in pubs.
On one subject they were agreed, that it is in one’s own class that the traitor conceals himself. The lesser nobility’s natural enemy is the nobility, the wealthy, the state from which they extract their privileges. The peasants’ bane is their own kulaks; the bourgeoisie fears only its own petit bourgeoisie, the gentry, its own bailiff. It is one’s truest self, in other words, the self you have just shed, or the one you aspire to, the soul slightly removed and granted a temporary advantage, who thunders down the pass dressed in party clothes and takes no prisoners. This is the sad story of men who do not make their antecedents clear. And one day while the two of them were riding on the American steam tractor, the Professor straddling the hood and facing Father at the wheel, they agreed that the only interesting philosophical question left was whether it was possible to pass on what one had acquired.
The Professor was obsessed with the fact that human self-consciousness was different from anything else that previously existed, and he admired the dog because his purposiveness was less complicated — he did not spend his days watching himself and doing nothing. Having learned to be actively passive, the dog did not waste time stressing the difference between himself and everything that had gone on before.