GENIUS

 

 

Genius is the ability to survive impossible situations.

Jean-Paul Sartre

 

 

he grandson peers down the stair-well. Smooth marble, perhaps some synthetic stone, its secret now forgotten. He sees, far below, in the light greenish, dusty sun, his grandfather. His grandfather is animated, on his bald head there is perhaps a fly, perhaps just a vein flickers to give the excuse for broad gestures, intimations of an itch. The grandson thinks of those jokey pictures, where the marbled skull has a fly on it, the public drawn from veneration to brush it away – their gesture the reason for the being of the guardian in uniform seated in the corner. His life’s work to arrest that public gesture, prevent the painted fly being knocked off the painted skull.

His grandfather bends over a deep deep well, like the stairs held in an art deco ellipse, the water a cold green, and there, far at the bottom, a white fish, a white flesh, a naked woman, taking some special underwater cure for fatness. Between the grandfather and the grandson a head, somewhere at the middle of the stair, pokes out like an iron muzzle: his father’s head, his son’s head. The grandfather, in this memory, is deeply into fascism. Probably the Duce is outside somewhere in hot boots, cursing the organisers of some parade, the sun, his fury puffing him up: dreaming of piles of skulls, never enough. The grandfather is doing well: he has a marble staircase, and a marble bath for quackery. The father – his son – will be an honest man, but less successful, and his son, the grandson, now at the top of the tree, the stairs, a little less successful, and so less honest, than the pair of them.

All three of them are geniuses. The grandfather is trying to sell genius, it being fascism and the times are hard; the son will try to give his away, it being the turn of communism, and sacrifice all round; and it’s the grandson who will try to go against nature, do something that will really challenge all the family trees and stairs: something fascism and communism in their wholly different ways – grandfather a conman and exploiter, the son – the father – a victim-philanthropist – wouldn’t have considered even right, or even necessary. For genius is often metaphorised into marble, into diamonds, but it’s also quite like treacle, or like tar, sticky, sweet, or even quite repellent to the taste.

 

 

*

 

 

‘Genius,’ said the grandfather, ‘Gives us a poor time with women, a distant time. And they – the authorities – felt genius was a fascist thing. Well, not democratic, certainly.’ He pauses: should he go further? ‘Mussolini wanted me to get rid of his fat. But he wouldn’t sink, and he couldn’t hold his breath. The idea is that depth, the cold of the water, the aversion to drowning – all that would burn it off: and then my prices – they made you think before going for another blowout! But Mussolini couldn’t handle it.’

‘But, father,’ the son – the father – asks the grandfather, ‘you were in with them, the bosses, the gerarchs, the rasses?’

‘I got our money from them, certainly. Never from the poor, you can’t anyway get money from the poor, nor yet the skinny,’ and he laughs a high cracked note like the Angelus bell, ‘I never sank to exploiting the poor, though that too will come. When we are equal, Stanislaus, when the poor exploit the poor, then we shall have democracy. And then, on tiptoe, I shall raise my hat. “Goodnight, good gentlemen, it’s late for me, goodnight, I do not think that this last game’s for me.”’

‘Father, you never wear a hat,’ says the son, the father, affectionately.

The old man has seen many massacres. Officially, as an official, and then, much later, when you start to think only of your own death, the cart you drag that ends up heavier and heavier, finally it overtakes the horse – yourself – more massacres. The winters massacring: the peasants drinking antifreeze, the trains running on time unpublished but precise, carrying the passengers here to massacre, and there – to massacre.

The grandfather says, ‘What could a genius do then? A super-massacre to end it all. A soft gun with a myriad barrels to shoot us all stone dead as we slept, a super-frost to kill us like dogs pointing as we guarded in the night. Nothing, however, in nature ever repeats itself, and that is why we know there are emotions. They get in through the gaps, and they are why we kill, are killed. Perhaps why we die.’ He coughs in apology. ‘But at least, I held firm. I resisted.’

His son says, ‘But without courage.’

‘Without courage, yes. But with great persistence. A great honesty in persistence.’

He pauses. ‘I was always in positions to grasp the generosity of others – I was the witness of their courage.’ Another, massacring, pause: ‘For what it was worth,’ and quickly adds, ‘Worth to me, I mean, not them, of course.’

 

 

*

 

 

The grandfather has projects, the father, impressions; the son, a design. The grandfather called his son Stanislaus, not because of the winter campaign in the USSR, not because of any political turns of tides, but for Joyce’s brother, another angle on genius, a genius at an angle to a genius. Grandfather pulls back lips, almost the colour of liver, and says, ‘The pity, that our species is so – carnivorous,’ and grins with his two teeth sticking out, a Dracula, a lone wolf, as if to show that of the real, the fearsome horrors, there aren’t that many left, already howling towards extinction. He says to his son, Stanislaus, ‘Of all the massacres, the worst I saw was in that village, the Americans thought it was quite another, quite a different village, of quite a different importance, but the villagers knew quite well where they were, and the bombs came down by accident, it was like a miracle, with the walls all going down, the arms and legs, alas, all going up and down, and only we deserters, and the mules and donkeys, in stout rocky cellars, safe. And it was then my project changed. I thought – not fat, not the deep baths, but gas: that is the answer. Intestinal gas – the motive and emotive power. The key to passions, and the means for traction. Attraction – traction.’

‘You mean,’ says Stanislaus, ready to get a laugh for, out of, his grandfather, ‘Mussolini’s pulling-power lay in his farts?’

‘Exactly, dear boy. Farting in public. That’s why we couldn’t get him down to the bottom of our pool. But think – those guts linked to pistons, propellers, a Hindenberg of immense capacity.’

But Stanislaus is not enthused, he’s heard this claptrap all before. Genius would be to get Mussolini fitted up as a combustion device.

His grandfather says, ‘That village, I recall, had trouble with the French troops, the revolutionaries – requisitioning mules for harvest, the villagers hid them, and the village was burned down,’ and he cackles like a pile of halms burning, and Stanislaus carefully sets the problem along some Party line, judiciously sets his own and keeps it to himself, certainly none of the parties, mules, villagers, Napoleon’s men, Stanislaus, the Party – are better off, but then, dialectics is not a soup kitchen but a wonderful marriage of kaleidoscope and telescope.

Stanislaus is interested in his impressions, not the grandfather’s projects – his father’s projects. He trudges round Europe, finding impressions – they may be a woodcut, a clumsy old diamond, a confessional, a dog-cart, some rusty clothes, a copy of some picture that looks familiar. And these he sells, or fails to sell, living on his wits, his genius, ‘And all the time on Party business?’ asks his son, ‘Not always,’ the reply, meaning hardly ever, what would the Party want from this kind of essence, of completeness, redolence, the quiddity?

He tells his son, ‘A true collector chooses just the single piece, passing over all the others,’ but in this case Stanislaus is not a real collector, for he brings back all kind of immemorabilia, mounted moths moth-eaten, glass bowls for hanging goldfish in, complete sets of hotel room keys, maps of subway systems. In his own brilliant mind, ideologies have already dissolved, everywhere has moved on and over from itself, the parties have all ceased activity and changed their names, the rousing regimes have packed away their drums and trumpets, and the great nursery plan – the tree house, the eternal summer holiday, the neighbourhood gang, the peeking (or gawping) at the rich kids – all these extravagant schemes come to an end and school begins again, tougher lessons though, and Stanislaus is saved from disillusion not by genius but by some quiet old-fashioned taste. So that some of his findings – the mirror from Burgos opalescent like grease, the naif crucifixion from Peć with the crescent-shaped nails – someone will buy them. Someone will buy these keepsakes, pay a tribute to the wandering Stanislaus, who gradually comes to learn everything about everything, so when the Party founders under him, he scarcely notices. It has become a wife, embarrassing with all her flirts and picayune habits, and Stanislaus ponders over her gravestone: does he ‘sadly’ miss her, ‘deeply’ miss her, or is his decision never to re-marry comment enough on the old harridan, even, he thinks, the old harlot?

The question anyway is one for genius, since Stanislaus’s family was acquired sidestepping marriage, in the least painful way. His son the product, maybe, of a warning against death, maybe of death itself. The son a kind of legacy, of the figure in a coffin that might have been an unknown father-in-law, and for his son a grandfather. Or just some unknown; death himself; his wife’s lover, perhaps even the father of this son, and so, in a kind of tidy way, his brother?

And that sorts out his son, kind of, and death and birth, but not the mother of his son (a fascist? Spanish? Mad? A mad Spanish fascist?) – and not his wife, the Party-metaphor.

He thinks of Leibniz and is glad he never knew how, when or why his own, his only, father died. Which means, of course, that probably the old man didn’t go, will never go, but just sank down and out of sight, like those fish in Lake Baikal that fight the instinct to come up to the light (or maybe never even see it, have no ‘up’ that’s light or dark) – and if they do, explode: bodies, the atmosphere detonating them, and immediately resolving the problem of their fat, or if they were Mussolini, extinguishing themselves in total fart.

 

 

*

 

 

‘I was in Spain,’ said the father. ‘In the church, under the lamps a set of flies was whirling. Exploring the corners of a barn dance: a computer working out equations. A child playing cat’s cradle. You know flies, you’ve seen them?’ he asks the child, the son, who nods.

‘Then I saw, beneath the flies, the coffin. A face like a great cheese but two eyebrows darkly drawing together like two meat hooks, a nose like an owl’s beak, and lips like two pale threads of liver. And dead, quite quite dead.’

The father mimes being nailed to the spot. ‘And then I see a woman in black, but not lace, just like black jeans, oilcloth. It is your mother. She leads me into a robing room. I remember the body – he held a miniature, like Spanish court portraits of the sixteenth century, and she was the grown version of the miniature. Her father, dead? Grandfather? Brother? She pulls me into these white and purple vestments, the arsenic green, that ecclesiastical violet: it was terribly hot, or you’d think it was spring, entering so many crocuses, or maybe folds of the body, but bodies deteriorating, meat rotting. And so hot. And then a priest comes in, he strips naked quite naked, but not as you’d expect, a young body, but an old one, the hair rubbed off the buttocks like an old fur rug, veins popping out everywhere. And as he prepares to robe, he farts, and under cover of that, we depart. But an awful fart, like viscera in a jar unstoppered after months. Then she draws me through a dining room, that smell of rancid oil, a basket full of bottles: McGinnis OLD Kentucky Katsup. Then a laundry room, and then a huge depository for priests’ umbrellas, all broken, there must have been acolytes or penitents whose lives were spent repairing them? What with? Other umbrellas?’

Reluctantly, the father goes on. ‘And so, pulling me here and there, I finally came to realise, though at different times, and with different modalities, that this was to be, and now, time being what it is, that this had been, your mother. And that these rooms – the bar across the street, the game of billiards – well, it struck me before we were out of the church and its outworks. The chambers of the pyramid. From the centre to the outside. From the mystery of the burial chamber to the false tomb, to the treasure, the slaves, the banqueting hall.’

The son asks, ‘But her purpose was quite different? Not to save you from entombment, from burial with the – whoever. The great chief. The big cheese-face.’

‘Quite, quite different. And when we had made love – or, rather, when I had made love and she had made love, or better, when I had entered upon the mystery, and when she had revealed, I think, quite another one.’ He pauses, and the son is impatient. The father goes on, ‘She asked me to put out the garbage. In the alley, masses of garbage she had, cigar butts and ashes, decks of cards, .22 long cartridges – only the boxes, of course. “It was time to put out the garbage,” she said. And by God she was right.’

The son thinks of pyramids and the coppery desert outside, strewn with long .22 cartridge cases, bandits with cues strapped to their saddles like bow cases, their heads wrapped in embalming cloths against the dust.

The father says, ‘And only later did I see, the black, the grey the yellow in the church, the arsenic green of that mint drink at the bar. The tantra! We went through all the colours of the tantra, and only later did I see that! She was not a saviour and a messenger, but, in her way, a seer.’

The son asks, ‘But you didn’t believe all that?’

‘Naturally not. If there was anything to believe or disbelieve: I just recognised the colours, the pink of the gecko, wrongly called a salamander, the bowels of the dead ruler drawn through the skull as if the brain and the intestine were the same corruptible organ. I recognised it all, of course.’

The son prompts, ‘And then, suddenly, there I was.’

‘Yes, ten years later, there you were. Delivered by train.’

The son asks, in love with his own story, ‘How did you know it was me?’

The question puzzles the father. ‘That you were your mother’s son? That you were conceived on that busy afternoon? That I owed you bed and board? Well, a little man of ten gets over lots of the troubles of fatherhood. But of course, I don’t chop logic. It would be odd if the questions all turned out to have the same answer. No, what I recognised in you was genius. And, of course, you were addressed.’

They contemplate the infinite chain of coincidence which places them together face to face in this room at this time.

The son says, ‘I had a football.’

The father says, ‘You had had a football. A major had thrown it off the train.’

The son says, ‘But not a mystery. Though an odd toy to take on a train journey, from Spain to France. But you were still a comrade? You think it might have been full of plans, information? Landing in a field near Leon. Ball in the face waking the officer, infuriating him?’

The father says, ‘Yes, I was a comrade, that’s why in part I went to Franco’s Spain.’

The son knows his story thoroughly. ‘If I knew it was a major, you can be sure I knew the football was empty: no cash, no plans.’

The father assents, wistfully. ‘But you might have the rank wrong. He might have been deserting. The panels in the football stitched in a certain way? The leather even, sometimes gave a clue. Though, I admit, only that genius was communicating unto genius, haha,’ he laughs, but is not convinced, is not convinced that anything at all funny has been said.

 

 

*

 

 

The son is very drunk. He can’t remember what he’s drinking. He is in a Chinese restaurant, a long, serpentine boiler room, shaped and decorated like the bed of the Tiber, fish boiled and fried, offered from stalls, receptacles in the walls, the banks – sea worms, grey cod, grey carp, grey dragons. It is very hot: the son says, ‘My grandfather was Claudio Tagliacozzo,’ which is a lie. He says, ‘My father was Arcangelo Piras’, and this was a lie too, no one in his family is known to be Jewish, nor a Sard, he himself speaks with a heavy Spanish accent when he’s drunk.

A Chinese says, ‘This lady has been separated from her party’, and they walk down the river bed, eating together. The fish are kept in grass, in the cubbyholes, as if they are resting in a catacomb. It is terribly hot. The son tells her his name: ‘I’m Eugenio,’ and he is very drunk, but doesn’t feel drunk. They rub their bodies together. She seems to like this. Her back is bare, and they rub themselves on every piece of bare flesh. It is as if they are eating one another. It is as if they have eaten one another. She rubs her breasts against him.

Eugenio knows he cannot have seen his grandfather at the bottom of the stair-well, he doubts he can ever have seen his father and his grandfather together. Both of them just petered out. Perhaps they are alive. The men in the kitchens are arguing and bringing down cleavers as points of emphasis, thwack, cling, and hawking and cursing. Eugenio says to the woman, separated from her party, ‘My father went many times to China. He was a brilliant man. He worked for the communists, but in the end he felt they were too human. I think he would have preferred ...’ he wants to say his father would have preferred it if they had been less Chinese, but this is an unpardonable thing to say. The woman takes his hands and they rub against each other, back to back.

He lets the manager take the money for all the fish they have eaten, and he’s so drunk he is glad that he’ll find out what it cost only tomorrow. The woman says, ‘And you could give me eighty dollars. Or a hundred and twenty,’ and he hands her his wallet.

Later, they make love, with great difficulty (he is very drunk), but to him it does not seem a paid service, though he can’t say why. Perhaps because he is so drunk, it all takes a long time, and from many angles, and much detail. So, he thinks of an act of love, or at least of many, unclear emotions. As she leaves him, he says clumsily, ‘I hope you find your party,’ and she reacts to this joke, or courtesy, by making an angry face. He wonders sometimes if a ten-year-old will arrive one day, an address label round their wrist, speaking Italianate Chinese and wearing some young version of his face, or hers.

 

 

*

 

 

Eugenio said, ‘Of course, you can have rights without knowing it, without understanding them.’

‘Of course,’ agrees the foundress, ‘But if the creatures understood, even a little, we would be so much more convincing as their champions.’

So Eugenio, half with a wink, half with a sigh, half with a brush of his sleeve against the dust on his Leibniz, half with relief that his pay no longer depended directly on the whims of human beings, went to work as philosopher for the animals in the Foundation for Rights-in-general. He dissociated himself from working for people. ‘It doesn’t seem apposite, given my antecedents,’ he says, though not knowing with any precision what these are.

He does not, of course, teach philosophy to the rats – who are eager to learn but have the wrong kind of brain surface: the cats, who are quick but impenetrably sceptical, and the dogs, omnivorous for information but unable to recognise connections. Instead, he creates a caring environment; he manufactures, observes and grades rights-laden situations. He has, of course, his own secret project which involves non-carnivores. He has much light-hearted trust in earthworms, as legitimate heirs of everything we leave, including anything digestible from our ethics.

He does not go very far. He stereotypes the animal species. After the incident in the Yellow River Restaurant, he has taken to stereotyping human situations. All those fishes, some reduced to skeletons, vomited up, still articulated, the next morning.

 

 

*

 

 

Eugenio sees a newspaper obituary of his grandfather, and thinks of the spack of fish exploding in the tank as demonstrations of the power of deep water therapy. But there is nothing of that, and it seems it’s a mistake, partial, total, and his father’s life is being told, ‘remarkable mediation with the Spanish communists to accept the successors to the Regime ... crowning accomplishment ... the dissolution of his own party, in an age now less ideological than divided by questions of material substance,’ and Eugenio grins, thinking of the tantra. ‘Always a democratic liberal rather than a liberal democrat’, the paper buzzes on unaware the subject too is guffawing at the terms, ‘at heart’, the description; ‘a man of the left but not of extremes’.

Eugenio waits for his father’s letter which will put all their lives and deaths in perspective. It is hermetic, but asks for money, ‘a tempting business project for your spare cash, or savings’, refers to ‘the Spanish lady, your mother, now translated into a “socialist” I hear’ – how?

Then there is a fierce attack on Eugenio’s work, ‘Breaking down the last defence that keeps, protects, one species from another ...  insane impulse to communicate at all costs that ill-conceals the human will to dominate by juridical orders ... leave the poor cats and fish alone, to fight it out, if that is how you see it ... none of us carnivores has long on earth,’ and suggesting that the flies over the coffin in Leon – had it been Leon? – were a living digital computer telling off the ages of man.

‘All we have, Eugenio,’ the letter ends, ‘is our genius: at worst our wits, at best our capacity to map the tide of history, and then to find our patch of dry. The river bed after the flood, the Chinese say, is safer than the highest treetop.’

But then too, Eugenio thinks as he goes to the airport to collect a shipment of earthworms, a kind that is able to digest papyrus and is said to construct vast underground warrens – floods don’t just happen, they are caused as part of cycles, of land speculation, of irrigation, of human neglect and need.

He goes to the customs shed, and as he usually does, he wonders if he will go away with a cage of intelligent worms or a ten-year-old daughter, an airline label on her wrist, who will tell him of her life in Macao and, when the evenings lengthen, of the travels of Fa Hsien in India.

And then he will know everything about everything, just like his father.

As he waits, he thinks of telling her about his conception, and about hers, and of a story that his father might have told him, about the fat, happy communists once, when the water was deep and black and clean, letting down their lights into Lake Baikal, bringing the pressurised fish up, up towards the surface, until suffused with that brilliant golden light the fish burst, with joy, under a brilliant starlit sky.