That night I dreamt our national bedtime story: begat by virtue, winning through virtue, earning the right to correct the world. . and woke up in the middle of it, feverish and despairing.
He never appeared at breakfast and inquiries in the compound produced only hyperbolic shrugs and gaptoothed, golden grins. That was the last time for many years that I would see the agent called Iulus face to face, though we would shadow each other throughout our lifetimes and into something of the next. His self-confounded, mutilated little country has never been far from my thoughts since that day. I have yet to shake her pomegranate mud from my boots.
I went back to my bunk to make out my report. First impressions are most important, but it would take the rest of my life to sort them out. There is an immense relief in the knowledge that one actually knows nothing — that one can savor experience for itself, not because you can act upon it. Though my brain had collided with a labelless world, never before or since have my emotions been so lucid or distinct. I had been touched at all points. My empathy was, for once, exact. I opened the plaid valise and the Gladstone, and amongst the crumpled papers of the latter was a leatherbound volume, Da Historae Astingae: An Internal Guide to the External Barbarian. Each page was written in a different color ink, separated with dried leaves and herbs, and the incomparable female aromas of Cannonia made me giddy. But the Z-box was gone.
While the Astingi mounted an off-the-wall production of Titus Andronicus, the earliest and bloodiest of Shakespeare’s histories, from the first scene (“Alarbus’ limbs are lopt, and entrails feed the sacrificing fire”) to the last (“Set him breast-deep in earth, and famish him”), while the title character lost twenty-one sons in battle and personally dispatched another on stage, I was a merry genius for a week. What greater joy than to write without having to revise! I detailed the flora, fauna, and spiritual furniture of Semper Vero, listing their strategic possibilities as our condominium in Terra XX, our pleasure seat in the barbarian lands. I prayed that my well-fed American buttonhead might be pasted in brief appearance in that custodial lineage of tragic golden faces. And at the same moment, I vowed to desert from that army of Americans who would swarm over the world with answers, learning nothing.
Yes, there is a coffin coming. But I cannot tell you now who was in it.
EX LIBRIS (Iulus and Aufidius)
Father wrote every evening in his Historae Astingae: An Internal Guide to the External Barbarian, disguised as a “Guidebook for Travelers” in order to make a market for it. Working at top speed, he usually produced about one hundred and twenty sentences of impossible terseness per night. Behind his mahogany swivel chair there was a large table with sixteen chessboards that formed one huge board, lined with the standing pieces. The pieces stood there summer after summer, intermingling as time went on. I do not know with whom he played, nor what happened in the game. They may have served simply as paperweights. He explained the rules to me, but his attitude was that once I knew the rules, it was not necessary to play. The incomprehensibility of the game was apparently its most important feature.
Sometimes he permitted me to stay with him while he worked, provided I was absolutely silent. I sat next to him at the edge of the desk, with my slender wit and unmoved disposition, drawing convoluted schoolboy clouds as the books which surrounded us, interlocked and overlapped, flowed back and forth into one another like sea anemones or the Mze itself. And when he got up to consult a reference or simply to pace up and down, I stared at the folio next to me, its half-completed sentences looping away like a thin line of ponies on the horizon, inviting me to run down, ride them, pull hair from their manes.
I did not know then that writers give away everything that is original to them, and are always in danger of losing their whole substance. Writers are people who have exhausted themselves; only the dregs of them still exist. Writing is so real it makes the writer unreal; a nothing. And if one resists being a nothing, one will have the greatest difficulty in finishing anything.
Nor did I know that in his hyperfastidious, shamelessly private mind, he was envisioning a nonexistent genre. For no one ever writes the book he imagines; the book becomes the death mask of creation, it has its own future and survives like a chicken dancing with its head cut off. And the spy knows this better than anyone; to write anything down is to take colossal risk. In life you can mask your actions, but once on paper, nothing can hide your mediocrity.
Da Historae Astingae
A TRAVELER’S GUIDE TO THE CROWNLANDS OF CANNONIA INCLUDING THE MARCHLANDS OF KLAVIER WITH DIGRESSIONS INTO FERRYLAND AND THE TRIBUTARIES OF THE MZE, VAH, AND ITS
WRITTEN BY AN ANONYMOUS PERMANENT RESIDENT OF THESE LANDS, BUT NOT ABOUT HIMSELF
Go, little book
and wish to all
Flowers in the garden
Meat in the hall,
A bin of wine
A spice of wit
A house with lawns
enclosing it.
A living river
by the door
A nightingale
in the sycamore
AS WE HAVE REFUSED ALL ADVERTISING, ANYONE
REPRESENTING THEMSELVES AS OUR AGENT IS AN IMPOSTOR.
So, Valued Traveler, while your papers are being visaed and your baggage searched, put aside your imaginings, your idle curiosity, and your fear of discomfort in a strange land. I came here like yourself many years ago as a young man, and while not completely accepted to this day, have become a resident, raised a family, invented a profession, and benefitted not a little from the local culture. I have surveyed every romantic scene, gathered every mountain flower, measured every valley, and drawn conclusions as to what was excellent and what might be improved.
It is the humble duty of this writer to collect under all the varieties of circumstance such materials as may supply a groundwork for connected history and for general deduction. The reader who seeks elaborate political disposition, or the amusement derived from private anecdote, will be disappointed. Where it was thought necessary to go beyond the sphere of personal observation, German authorities of established merit have been relied upon. It was at one time intended to subjoin a sketch of the literature of the country. But upon this interesting subject it is not possible to write with a hasty pen. Cannonian letters are too extensive to be compressed, and it was not without great reluctance the author relinquished this object, being sensible that the true spirit and condition of a nation can never be appreciated without some insight into the progress of its literary culture. He trusts, however, that the design which is deferred will not be forgotten, and anticipates with much pleasure those hours in which he may pursue his labors upon the subject.