So far the eulogy’s been short on tribute and long on exhortation. A belief system, not a group of dead comrades, is being memorialized. But now the moment Guy has been waiting for.
Hers is a small voice, precise though somewhat enervated, a voice that has been so carefully cultivated to enclose a sense of prerogative that even now, more than four months after having been excised from an orderly life, it still conveys her unreserved faith that her expectations will in the end be met. But shortly Guy can hear in the voice the sort of anguish that wracks and diminishes the speaker. Just as he is flashing She loved one of them, Tania says, “Cujo was the gentlest, most beautiful man I’ve ever known.”
How could he not have known? Susan had mentioned something about being sad about Willie, but at that point Guy still needed a scorecard to keep track of the names of the players. He supposes that he figured that the black guy was the one named Willie, don’t ask why. Guy considers this a serious lapse on his part. The voice has the quality of an open sore. While her elegy draws upon the same jargon used by Teko and Yolanda, Tania circles again and again to Cujo. The things lovers tend to do.
Guy suddenly remembers a longish letter he wrote to his big brother, Ernest, making plain his love for a young woman whose name he claims, falsely, he can’t even remember now. What was he, eighteen? It was a letter he’d wanted to write because he felt that the force of his love demanded not merely its revelation at every opportunity but an accompanying detailed validation as well. He had labored — a letter filled to the margins with encomia and which went so far as to attribute to this girl opinions she had never held and sagacious quotations she had never uttered. That girl was alive, though. He had been writing of someone who eventually just walked out of his life, leaving him spangled in the sun of a morning long dead, chopped to half of what he’d been.
Come and get these memories, Guy snickers.
All wrapped up in Teko’s world-in-flames rhetoric, Tania’s naked mourning somehow seems even more poignant than it might have otherwise, as if she were struggling to express herself through tone of voice, through emphasis and cadence, alone. Now slow. Now monotone. Now barely audible. Cujo, Cujo, Cujo. It’s very difficult to listen to this oration and not be convinced that Tania means what she’s saying. Even if the cause was something she embraced halfheartedly, the love of Cujo justified any level of involvement. Cujo’s own involvement was total, ultimately a self-disappearing act. Guy wonders: Did Cujo imagine his death? But of course: all SLA rhetoric is steeped in the language of suicidal devotion to the ideals and goals of the SLA. Those ideals and goals are less precisely stated than the penalties for having trespassed against them. The goal is to defeat the pig, to kill the fascist insect. Guy sits listening to the tape broadcast over foundation-supported noncommercial radio, turning over in his mind the ways he can apply it to the authorized story he’ll try to peddle to Macmillan or Viking or Doubleday, and he knows that Teko, and certainly Yolanda, are aware that the fascist insect will never die, but that they already have attained something even better: They’re handling the biggest star in America. FROM HEIRESS TO TERRORIST. It almost rhymes.
The way she keeps coming back to the subject that haunts her. It just wipes him out.
Cujo was the gentlest.
Cujo taught the truth.
I loved Cujo.
Cujo was beautiful.
Cujo’s name meant something beautiful.
Cujo’s life meant something beautiful.
I never loved anyone like I loved Cujo.
Cujo never loved anyone like he loved me.
When they took Cujo from me, they ripped me off.
Cujo and I were always talking of important things.
I hate my parents, and love Cujo, by the way.
Cujo gave me something to share — and I keep it.
Her boilerplate devotions to the other members of the dead army sound earnest enough, as if she were trying to shut them inside a group of little boxes that have been neatly hammered together by Teko and Yolanda. When she talks about Cujo, Guy gets the feeling that she is trying to praise him back to life. Guy thinks, Love without a soul to receive it is like a ghost. It’s an odd thought for him, but there is such a haunting, searching quality to her voice. It is the inconsolable living who haunt the memory of the dead. Though that first blush, the idyllic inseparability, has long ago faded from his affair with Randi, Guy still tries to imagine what it would be like to know that she had died, to watch it from a distance as smoke signals hoisting the whole weight of their lives together into the air. The desolation.
Suddenly Guy is eighteen and on that dappled plaza, watching a girl walk into the morning fresh.
ONE LAST THING:
Canary pads. A child’s delight. Her father brought them home for her and her sisters in his briefcase, along with ballpoint pens, paper clips, typewriter erasers, reams of twenty-pound bond. The agreeable fact that they came from Daddy’s office, not from a store. Though that would have been all right too. Tania feels that if history has tossed her and this yellow pad together in this place at this moment, it is her own history. It’s an oddly comfy feeling, if false, the one this urban guerrilla has in the rear kitchen, piebald with sun and shadow, of the apartment on Euclid Avenue.
She works diligently, in shifting natural light. Though the others are waiting, she loses track of the time it takes. It seems a long time since she’s worked on a composition. From the other room comes Teko’s murmuring voice. There is an oddly familiar quality to the murmuring. Tania realizes, with only the mildest surprise, that Teko is imitating the tone and cadence of Cinque’s voice. He is recording his part of their collective eulogy to their fallen comrades, her own contribution to which she is now composing. She hears Yolanda loudly and contemptuously correct his pronunciation of W.E.B. DuBois’s surname. “Shit!” says Teko.
She bends to the work, her hand pleasantly cramped. Occasionally she massages it in the softening light. She reflects that sometimes dusk can seem later and more urgent than any part of the night, courting as each day does the petty grief over its own loss on the blushed horizon. It is too late. Tania feels that the last fading plumes of her trust in the world evaporated in the sky above Los Angeles, along with her old measure of herself. The true self is here at this table, transformed and annealed, and she takes care to make plain that her tribute is intended not merely to lay the dead to rest but as an annunciation.
“Greetings to the People. This is Tania. Now that the fascists have assassinated our six brothers and sisters the pig media waddles up to the trough to feast upon their brutalized remains. The lies and falsehoods they are spreading about our comrades are beyond even what we had thought them capable of. Cujo was the gentlest, most beautiful man I’ve ever known. In the short amount of time we had together he sought only to teach me the truth that had been kept from me throughout my life among the pigs. In the end he gave his own life for the People willingly and without hesitation. Some pig probably got a medal for shooting him down, but beware, pig: the name Cujo means ‘unconquerable.’ You may have destroyed his body but his spirit lives in the hearts and minds of the People. I never loved another individual the way I loved Cujo. I don’t mean the bourgeois love that seeks houses and fancy cars. I mean a mutual love based on the struggle for the People. They can’t take that from me. When the pigs stole Cujo from me I understood at last how it felt for thousands of beautiful sisters and brothers in Amerikkka when they were ripped off by the pigs of their loved ones. We mourn together! Let our guns sing our grief!