Anabella’s Hat
1
The butler says, “Lord Byron jumped out of the carriage and walked away.” Annabella appeared next. The butler says, “The bride alighted, and came up the steps alone, her countenance and frame agonized and listless with evident horror and despair.” A scarf, twisted about her head, was bunched up in imitation of a hat. Others report the arrival, among them Lord Byron. His memoirs were burned. One who read them claims Lord Byron took Annabella before dinner. They withdrew after dinner and lay in a four-poster bed near a fireplace. The crimson curtains of the bed, quickened by firelight, made flickering blood-colored walls. Lord Byron imagined himself within the membranes of a giant stomach. “I am in hell,” he screamed. Annabella crept downstairs, hid in the kitchen, and later begged medical advice. Assured that Lord Byron was mysterious, not mad, she hired investigative agents. A year passes. The incontinent Lord Byron flees to the Continent. His affair with his sister, consummated before the marriage, is being noised about. People cut him at parties. He flees; soon thereafter, dies in Greece. Annabella’s agents rush into the room. Lord Byron’s servant — a bad — tempered man named Fletcher — draws his sabre but they beat him unconscious and rip the boot from Lord Byron’s crippled foot. They saw a hoof of great beauty, subtly united with the fetlock. The memoirs — where Lord Byron mentioned it — were burned at Annabella’s insistence. Now, sufficient to say, in the mass of Byroniana — letters, scholarship, gossip — no extended reference to his hoof exists.
2
Lord Byron published amazing poems. He had sexual union with his sister. Then came the wedding. Afterward, with Annabella and her maid, he rode forty miles from Seaham Church to Halnaby Hall, where he honeymooned. It is said the day was cold and Lord Byron despised the cold, but nothing is reported as to where he sat in the carriage — beside Annabella or beside the maid, or if Annabella sat between, with the meat and bags and wine opposed. Fletcher, a sullen lout, refused to say a word. He galloped behind the carriage. It isn’t known if the maid was acquainted with Lord Byron, or if they sat as strangers pressed, he by she, at turns in the road. Reported then, as here reported, Lord Byron was cold. Annabella’s head, round as an Esquimau’s, was conservative of temperature. It is known that Lord Byron’s head, examined the previous year by the craniologist Spurzheim, was a structure of antithetical dispositions. The rest is inevitable. Indifferent to cold or hot — by nature, virtuous — the Annabella head through intimate contiguity with the crippled, incestuous bisexual caused him to feel dialectically cold, Satanic, probably squashed by the maid. It is rumored that he began shrieking, then stamping the carriage floor viciously with his hoof.
I Would Have Saved Them if I Could
GIVING NOTICE
A few days prior to the event, my cousin said, “I’m not going through with it. Call off the bar mitzvah.” My uncle said, “You’re crazy.” My aunt said, “I think so.” He’d already reserved the banquet hall, said my uncle, with a big deposit; already paid the rabbis, the caterers, the orchestra. Flying in from everywhere in the Americas and Canada were relatives and friends. My aunt said, “Deposit. Relatives.” My cousin said, “Do I know the meaning of even ten Hebrew words? Is the bar mitzvah a Jewish ceremony? Do I believe in God?” My aunt said, “Get serious.” My uncle said, “Shut up. The crazy is talking to me.” My aunt said, “You, too, must be crazy.” My cousin said, “Call it off.” My uncle said, “I listened. Now you listen. When the anti-Semites come to kill your mother, will it be nice to say you aren’t a bar mitzvah? Don’t you want to be counted?” My cousin pulled open his shirt. “Look,” he cried. My aunt said,“I can’t talk so I can’t look.”“Look,” he screamed. Green, iridescent Stars of David had grown from his nipples. My uncle collapsed on the wall-to-wall carpet. Looking, my aunt said, “I can’t talk so I refuse to look at your crazy tits.” That night my uncle sent telegrams throughout the Western Hemisphere. He explained, with regrets, that his son didn’t believe in God, so the bar mitzvah was canceled. Then he pulled my cousin’s five-hundred-dollar racing bike into the driveway, mangled the handlebars, kicked out the spokes, and left it for the neighborhood to notice.
A SUSPECTED JEW
Jaromir Hladík is suspected of being a Jew, imprisoned by the Gestapo, sentenced to death. In his prison cell, despite terror and confusion, he becomes ecstatic, then indistinguishable from his ecstasy. He is, in short, an ecstasy — the incarnation of a metaphysical state. Borges wrote this story. He calls it “The Secret Miracle.” Whatever you call it, says Gramsci, it exemplifies the ideological hegemony of the ruling class. In the mediating figure Jaromir Hladík, absolute misery translates into the consolations of redemptive esthesis. It follows, then, the Gestapo, an organization of death, gives birth to “The Ecstatic Hladík”—or, to be precise, “The Secret Miracle.” Borges, master of controlled estrangement, makes it impossible to feel that Jaromir Hladík — say, a suspected Jew of average height, with bad teeth, gray hair, nervous cough, tinted spectacles, delicate fingers, gentle musical voice — physically and exactly disintegrates (as intimated in the final sentences) between a hard stone wall and the impact of specific bullets.
THE SUBJECT AT THE VANISHING POINT
My grandfather — less than average height — had bad teeth, gray hair, nervous cough, tinted spectacles, delicate fingers, and a gentle musical voice. To appear confident and authentic, worthy of attention by clerks in the visa office, he memorized the required information — his mother’s maiden name, the addresses of relatives in America — and, walking down the street, he felt constantly in his coat pockets to be sure that he had photos of himself, wife, daughter, enough money for the required bribes, and the necessary papers — documents from America, passports, birth certificates, and an essay by himself in praise of Poland — when a pogrom started. Doors and windows slammed shut. The robots were coming. Alone in a strange street, he couldn’t tell which way to go. At every corner was death. Suddenly — for good or ill isn’t known — somebody flung him into a cellar. Others died. He, bleeding and semiconscious, hidden in a cellar, survived the pogrom. That day he didn’t get a visa to leave Poland. He was a tailor — short, thin-boned. Even in a winter coat, easy to fling. He crawled amid rats and dirt, collecting his papers. When night came and Poland lay snoring in the street, he climbed out of the cellar and ran home. Wife and daughter ministered to his wounds.All thanked God that he was alive. But it was too late to get a visa. The Nazis came with the meaning of history — what flings you into a cellar saves you for bullets. I don’t say, in the historical dialectic, individual life reduces to hideous idiocy. I’m talking about my grandfather, my grandmother, and my aunt. It seems to me, in the dialectic, individual life reduces not even to hideous idiocy.