Father knew this to be the response of one raised without pets. Against the Professor’s romanticism of the dog and its infelicities, Father had projected his own theory of the mind, based on observation.
“Did you know,” Scipio, the Professor had said proudly one day, prying open Wolf’s jaws, “that there are less bacteria in this lout’s mouth than ours?”
Father did know, but he knew something else as well. He knew it most when the Professor discoursed upon the center of the brain, its hidden problems and purposes, a space in which everything important in the world was essentially left unexplained. He knew it from dogs who had been eviscerated, died on him, or been split open by a bear, and it was this: at the center of the brain lies not a knot of history or chemistry, but an empty cavern, and none the less mysterious for that. In this echoing sinus, laced with veins and covered by the dome of the hippocampus, there exists no idea or thought, only emotional energies which eventually find their way into thought to be filed under “Useless Suffering.” The dog retains two arteries from the nose directly into this cavity, men do not, which is why our first reflex is to deny reality and complicate associations. The female of our species does not use her nose, or rather she uses it differently. Her nose is connected to her ear, while in men it is to the eye, a most savage degradation.
This was the basis of the friendship: the Professor couldn’t understand how Scipio, far more darkly pessimistic than he, could act so cheerfully and not project panic. And my father admired in Berganza the fact that he had developed an intellectual method to make up for his lack of nose, his poor judge of character.
Both may have underestimated me. For the dog gets our admiration because he is sniffing every moment of the day and does not confuse devotion with romance, which is why he is always emergent. His senses are attuned to snuffing out evidence of betrayal, and he transforms his deep cynicism into requests for constant attention. The dog is the only true detective, just as he is the only survivor without guilt. Men never get over the fact that the mind seems superior to the experiences presented to it. This basic misconception arises not because their mind is superior but because their sense apparatus is fooled.
One day after an exhausting ramble they returned to Father’s den for some serious libation, and while Father was pouring single-malt whiskeys, the Professor snuck up behind him and slipped the collar of Dresden rings about his neck.
“Easy, Scipio,” he said. “I won’t hurt you.”
Father didn’t move a muscle.
“You know there are few men whose society I can tolerate with equanimity, Berganza.” Handing a whisky to the Professor, the collar closing only slightly, he proceeded to unlock a vitrine and take an artifact from the glass shelves. “The Oriental snaffle bit,” he announced. “The swivel action allowed the barbarians to outmaneuver the Western centurions, and was the single most important accouterment in their success. Here, try it on.” As he went round behind him, the leash went slack. He slipped the bit between Berganza’s beard and mustache, holding the delicate reins of amaranthine leather above his head. As they wolfed down their Scotches Russian-style, the Professor’s jaw jutted out, and a light appeared in the black eyes as he dropped to all fours.
“Does it hurt?” Father inquired.
The Professor shook his head defiantly.
“It’s supposed to hurt a little. Observe then, this smallest pressure,” and Father pulled the bit slightly to the right, pulling back the Professor’s lips and exposing the slightly yellowed incisors.
“Very good, Berganza.” Then he pulled on the left rein, and the Professor’s mouth was drawn into a quite uncharacteristic but not unattractive grin. The Professor wrapped the end of the chain’s leash around his own neck, singing, “Let’s go, heigh-ho, mount up, Scipio!” and the Professor obligingly sauntered around the room with Father astride, careful to keep his weight on the balls of his feet, as his yolk-fellow gave him slack. And so they played around with each other as they would permit no other mortal, not even a woman. The library rang with their shouts, and soon damp splotches appeared in the armpits of their suit coats.
“You were born to pull at the traces, Berganza,” Father exclaimed.
“And you, dear Scipio, know just how hard to pull!”
But the Professor was soon winded, and they fell into a heap in the corner howling for joy like animals.
Father was fascinated by leaks. He spent his boyhood building dams of every conceivable material across every creek, rivulet, and runnel, observing how long and in what manner they eroded and unraveled. To him this seemed the basic principle on which nature and science had collaborated: the inevitability of life randomly breaking through its forms. He applied the principle to his breeding, respecting above all the genes which leaked — in error, wisdom, or divine plan was unimportant — while judging the desirability of the mutation, then determining how it might be fixed. The mind was not to be judged on the quality of the ideas it had, but on how it dealt with ideas broken down and dispersed — ideas which broke their own membrane, as it were. In short, where most men would have identified with the dam or the water, having faith in river gods or whoever watches over engineers, my father’s concern was with the banks of the stream. The nature of the problem, as opposed to the essence, could then be put in an entirely different light. If, as was often said in those days, man encounters an abyss, it behooved him to know its depth and general topography, and it should make a difference whether this declivity was chasm or pond, brook or gorge, mudflat or rushing torrent. The river’s origins in his high backyard, or the muddy and boring delta where it slithered into the sea, did not concern him. It was what to do with the damn thing as it crossed one’s property. If one could not ignore the river’s disruptive powers, one could at least manage change at an acceptable rate. In this as in most things, he was ahead of his time, as velocity was to become the primary subject of the century.
I mention this only to explain that Father’s den was largely a collection of leaks and holes, the artifacts of obdurate and inexplicable pressures. He thought of books as dams — marvels of engineering which nevertheless eroded at different rates as they aged. He had a preference not for those which stood the test of time, which he considered simply a matter of luck, but for those which self-destructed before they were finished. For what defined a book was not whether you read or wrote it, but the honest notice that just at the very moment as you were adding the last of its blockages, they were eroding as fast as they were built. In his library the catalogue was predictable: a section of history which expended all its energy in mastering secondary sources so as to never render judgment; philosophy with the glaring contradictions in logic; science based on untestable hypotheses; a series of collected fiction lacking an odd volume, which brought its market value to nil; several roped-off sections of “unreadable masterpieces,” novels written by cowards in heroic tone; poetry whose complete surrender to loftiness finally impoverished it. He specialized in collecting books that neither petered out nor went awry, being fundamentally misconceived from the start. There was also a collection of incunabulae whose value was the precise inverse of their contents, books which appreciated to the exact extent they could no longer be read, or had became too valuable to read. The only complete set in the library was Cardinal de Baussets’s Histoire de Fénelon. His favorite book, he often said, was Volume Four, a tome whose pages had been carefully glued together, forming a solid rectangle which had then been hollowed out so that it could conceal a small dagger and some stamps.