The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (27 page)

“Don’t be scared, there won’t be sexual aggression. The monster won’t attack the professor, and if the professor attacks me, I’ll defend myself. Don’t worry, I won’t denounce you. I know you need the salary.”

“No, you can’t stay. Small college. People talk.” “I don’t care.”

“I do. As you said, I need the salary.”

“You’d be less uneasy if there were someone here at night.”

“No, I wouldn’t. I’d be intimidated by another person. No, no. End of subject.”

“Even if the first hypothesis is true?”

“What’s the first hypothesis?”

“That I came up with the letter to make you need me, to make you dependent.”

“Precisely. I need to be careful. Youth is irresistible.”

“And if Patrick asks you to try? He offers you the plan of action: the neurotic who solicits the help of the student he took to bed. She’ll also become vulnerable and will confess to everything in the end.”

“ ‘She’ll also become vulnerable?’ What does Patrick know about her? We’ll wait until Tuesday, after the meeting with the FBI. I’ll tell you if I’ve changed my mind.”

“Now may I sit down?”

The professor makes a motion toward the chairs, the couch. He hadn’t noticed that they’d both been standing the whole time.

“Excuse me. I need to be at the office in fifteen minutes.”

He looks at his watch. Yes, fifteen minutes.

“Okay. I’ll come Saturday afternoon, as usual. Maybe, in the meantime, I’ll find another message in the mail. Something more explicit.”

Caspar looks at her, frowning.

“It wouldn’t be bad. Not bad at all.”

It sounded like a plea, or advice. He’d lost his humor. And it wasn’t midnight, just three in the afternoon.

“Have you thought about that phrase? I learned it, I know it by heart. It’s been in my head for a long time, I think. I’ve seen it before sometime, somewhere. I don’t know where. I’ve gotten old. I don’t remember.”

“You remember enough, too much. If it’s asleep in your memory, it will wake up. I know the phrase by heart, too. It doesn’t evoke any memories, however. I’m uncultured, just like my entire generation. Conspiracies amuse me.”

“We’ll talk on Tuesday, after Patrick’s interrogation. I’m in a hurry now.”

Peter’s in no hurry to get anywhere, the good-natured dialogue is putting him in a bad mood. He wants to go outside, to be alone. Tara retreats; the professor sets out apathetically toward campus. The wind is cold and wet. The library is warm and quiet. Books, magazines, newspapers from around the world. The sect of Saint Computer! At prayer, in front of the magic screen. Not even the Internet Generation, born from an electronic circuit instead of a woman’s womb, can retain the quotation. But Tara never found the magic button. If only there were some kind of a hypnosis to trigger the phosphorescent needle of memory’s magnet.

A fossil among the young servants to the God of Algorithms, that’s what I am, the professor decided, abandoning the temple.

Alone in his den. On the nightstand, under the pile of socks and tank tops, the yellow envelope. Tara’s old letter. Was that a different Tara, the one who was accusing professors of giving her too-high marks, while barely out of high school? A year ago, she’d confronted a professor who gave her a mark that was higher than what she’d expected. Now she was a gentle comrade. Was the past still part of the present?

In the envelope there was Tara Nelson’s essay on the novel
Enemies: A Love Story.
It had arrived a few days after her impertinent letter and after the end of the semester.

Unhappiness revolves around an inability to interact with unfamiliar circumstances. Losing old habits feels like losing the self. The solution isn’t to be found in the old habits, nor in a new identity, but in fantasy.

He’d read those pages on a July day, almost a year ago now. He’d discovered them, unexpectedly, in P.O. Box 1079.

Had Tara chosen the novel about the exiles to provoke him?

It isn’t possible both to remain in the old identity and to integrate into the new one.

Was that true? We are imperfect impostors at home and away from home, on Earth and on the moon.

From the war experience forward, the hero is receptive only to his
own thoughts. The Christian woman who saved him and whom he is going to marry as a gesture of appreciation is an angelic Polish peasant woman, an illiterate saint, who, in the conversion to Judaism, becomes a sort of clown. The only escape from the real is the complicit relationship of mutual masochism, between the husband and the coreligionist, sexually voracious Masha.

What’s the connection to the threatening postcard? There’s no connection. No connection at all! Just the fact that both preoccupied him now, simultaneously.

The escape from the real, like sexual liberation. Mental fantasy connection . . . the sex drive, the only labyrinth. Mental fantasy is their mutuality, physicality, sexual appetite, the only labyrinth that either of them can truly call his and her own.

Labyrinth?

A year ago, the word didn’t seem suspect. Now it has definition, phosphorescence, wile. Peter stops, asks himself what the woods have in store for the night, whether the patrol will be more discreet. He wants to sleep.
The sex drive, the only labyrinth that either of them can truly call his and her own.

In the novel, the true enemy is memory, the trauma imposed on identity. The terms of the biography become the morbid impulse. To incorporate past trauma into the new system doesn’t require breaking down barriers, but rather to ignore its existence. To have a child, for example? Or to lose yourself in the labyrinth of sexuality?

Death. Lady Death! The Madame is gracing me with her imperial attention!
Sleep, everlasting sleep,
the somnolent Peter keeps repeating.

The red sky. The elephants on never-ending stilts. The insect-elephants, delicate cartilage. The astral giant from the prehistoric wilderness. Enormous, velvety mass, imperial tusks, indestructible ivory. Greenish silt draining from the trunk.

The female and male approaching, without ever getting close to one another. On the back of each, a carpet. On the carpet, the monument floating in air. On the trunk of the elephant on the left,
an eye. On the female’s, the ocular globe is in between her lips, which are as red as a cosmetics ad.

Below, the infinite. Gray hills, the landing pad, the watch post, two forms running, with a flag and a torch.

The sky is orange then pink then red again. The elephants. A sky striped with thin legs ready to buckle. The arrows of transparent bone, bearing the weight of the bodies and their burdens and the vault. The blood of dawn. The stones are slipping from the Indian rug, they hang in the air. The painted eye. The eye of Special Agent Patrick. On the rug covering the quadruped’s spine, it says
Patrick.

Sapped, Ga
par twists his body toward the nightstand, braces himself up in bed, props himself against the wall. The car brakes in front of his house. It’s not nighttime, but another day. Dawn, thank God! He’d slept for many hours, hadn’t heard the patrol until now.

The great volumes of the
Encyclopedia Britannica.
Thin pages, thin signs, the cryptograms of the past. The reader is pushed to the past that came before the past.

The Minotaur can’t be killed, the Old Man argues in the chapter about the labyrinth. The Minotaur finds vengeance, transforming the modern labyrinth into a hell. The Minotaur, the Taurus constellation. The promise of rebirth, spring. Futile annotations.

The telephone; the taxi driver can’t find the hermit’s cabin. It’s not the driver but Madame J.T. Peter has only just realized that the Vietnamese woman has an unnaturally low voice. The head of campus security wants to know whether the professor is going to spend the next few days on the grounds. Madame Tang alerts the dean about everything that goes on, who leaves campus, when, to return when, and in whose company.

No, Professor Ga
par won’t be on campus for the next few days; in fact, he was just waiting for the taxi to take him to the station. J.T. advises him to close his curtains before leaving, to leave the front light on, as if he were home. And especially, to let the college know in the future when he plans to leave and for how long.

Deserted train station, no followers. An almost empty train car,
no one but a hunched, pale old grandmother, sinking into a book, her spectacled grandson fidgeting nearby.

Did the mysterious postcard come from admirers of the Old Man, the alchemist? The encyclopedic scholar used to talk about the invisible fires of Hades, the underground world of the dead, the labyrinth of the cross, the bloodied thread of Ariadne, the knot as labyrinth. The labyrinth as initiation. The nomadic, exile, the underground. The serpentine maze made of a single line. The world captive in the modern tunnel, the tunnel of the subconscious? The Minotaur will devour the people from the tunnel! The Minotaur, in the invisible center of fatality, the scholar would say.
The labyrinth made of a single, straight line is invisible. A single straight line, which is invisible.

Fatality hidden in profane numbers: temperature, speed, kilometers, cholesterol, blood pressure, glycemia? You don’t need symbols to kill. Transcendent advertisements and trivial instincts, Maestro? Is that the secret of the proselytizers?

Mynheer raises his bored gaze to his notebook. In the window to the right, the river is keeping vigil. The winter fog. The majestic, imperturbable river. A single line.
Single, straight line, everlasting.

He closes his eyes. He opens his eyes: the postcard. He reads the text on the back. A biomathematics professor at Cornell University is protesting against the State Department’s harassment of the Mexican senator Castillo Martinez, blocked from entering the U.S., where he’d been invited for a public debate. Under this passage, the letter from the reader in Long Island about the State Hermitage Museum in Russia. The middle of the seventies, trip to Saint Petersburg, then Leningrad, the tour guide, the French Impressionist paintings brought back from Germany at the end of the war.

The postcard sits, aged, in Gaspar’s hand.

“What’s that got to do with me? What connection do I have with this nonsense? I’m neither Russian nor German, nor a museum specialist nor a tourist. I’m not even an amateur painter. And I don’t see the tie between the Hermitage, the State Department,
and the labyrinth. Nor between the USSR, Ariadne, and the life of the Alchemist.”

Saturday evening, Tara comes without bringing the mail. A bored gesture, a trifle; it doesn’t merit attention.

On the table, two glasses and a bottle of red wine. The professor was prepared! Not just the bottle of wine and glasses, but even an apple pie. And a little delicate jar, and another delicate jar. A festive or ill-fated evening, or both?

He’d slept deeply and woke up revitalized. A clear mind, precise intentions: the Labyrinth! He will talk to Tara about the Labyrinth, he will show her his notes from the New York Public Library and the college library. “The Old Man, as we will call him, wrote a lot about the subject, including a chapter in the
Encyclopedia Britannica.”

Tara had also come prepared: white shirt, low cut, long black skirt, elegant, tall boots. Her hair up in a small, black bun. Black eyes and mascara, intense brows. The professor is freshly shaven.

“The conspirators force us to talk about the labyrinth! The Old Man, that’s what we’ll call Dima, wrote much on the subject. Minos, the king of Crete, was punished with sterility because he didn’t sacrifice the bull he’d gotten as a gift from Poseidon, the god of the sea. The king’s wife will conceive a son with the bull. The monster Minotaur. Half man, half beast. Shut into a labyrinth by Minos.”

“Starts out well . . . what more could an American student on the threshold of her education wish for other than a lecture on mythology?”

“It’s not a lecture. It’s a preamble. For conversation. The American student might be of use. Through her acuity and freshness. She’s neither uneducated, nor uncultivated, nor innocent.”

“I’ve learned not to turn down compliments anymore.”