Aegypt Read online

  . . . acaba en mortal fiera,

  esfinge bachillera . . .

  Sphinx. Below was all the beast’s: she sitting (he could see it, it tightened and warmed his breast like coke) in his plush armchair, still in her shirt and platform shoes but nothing else, a little embroidered pillow flung at her feet for him to kneel on and work.

  ceremonia profana

  que la sinceridad burla villana

  sobre el corvo cayado.

  Ceremonia profana: rustic simplicity leaning on his shepherd’s crook might look upon it with amused disdain. He doubted that. If the burly villain at work on his billet-doux in the next room could have been there, could have looked upon that ceremony . . .

  ‘You want a beer?’ Spofford said, rising.

  ‘Um, sure,’ Pierce said.

  ‘They’re not so cold,’ Spofford said, bringing him a dusty bottle. ‘But you’re a sophisticate, right? You can drink beer English style.’

  ‘Sure,’ Pierce said. ‘A sophisticate, definitely.’

  ‘What’s the book?’

  Pierce showed him. ‘Pastorals,’ he said. ‘Poems about sophisticates who leave the city for the country.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Interesting.’

  ‘About how much nicer it is here than there.’

  Spofford sipped beer, leaning on the doorjamb. ‘It is nice,’ he said. ‘You should come and stay.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Pierce. ‘Don’t know if I could make a living.’

  ‘Can’t you do history anywhere?’

  ‘Well. In a sense.’

  ‘Come up here, then. Set up as a historian.’

  ‘Open a shop,’ Pierce said, laughing. He put aside the book and rose. He and Spofford went out the screen door into the moon-bright night. Rover lifted his head and thumped his tail against the boards of the little porch. Spofford took a few steps away from the house to urinate.

  So real, so real, Pierce thought; he had forgotten; had forgotten this alternation of real odors, this immense volume of air. Fireflies: he’d forgotten fireflies. I wish, he thought, I wish . . .

  ‘You could write a history of the Faraways,’ Spofford said, rebuttoning. ‘There’s material.’

  ‘Regional history,’ said Pierce. ‘That’s a good field. Not mine though,’ he added, thinking of it: a field, bounded by a low-piled stone wall, long grasses and lichened boulders, an old apple tree. Fireflies glimmering in the thistled darkness. Not his field: his field lay farther off, or closer in, beyond anyway, geometrical paths through emblematic arches, statuary, a dark topiary maze, a gray vista to an obelisk.

  Open a shop. Once upon a time, when he was a kid, when he first decided or understood that he would become a historian, he had had the vague idea that he would do just that, that historians did that, kept shops, dispensed history somehow to those who needed it.

  Turns out not so, he thought, looking at the moon, turns out not so. And yet.

  A fortunate retreat, at whatsoever hour: escape made good. For sure, if he fled, she would follow. Esfinge, Sphinx chalkokrotos, not in her own person of course, she had made herself pretty clear to him on that score; not in her own person, no, but no less vividly for that.

  ‘Listen,’ Spofford said.

  The owl, Athena’s wisdom bird or obscene bird of night (these Gongorisms are catching, he thought), asked again its single question.

  FOUR

  You could be born, Pierce believed, with a talent for history, as you could be born with musical or mathematical talent; and if you were, it would, like those talents, show up early, as in him it had.

  It was true, he thought, that lacking the born knack a person might still apply himself, and subject himself to the proper discipline, and through hard work and care do all right in the field without it – a thing which was probably not true of mathematicians or master chess players; but still such a knack existed. Nor was it solely a compendious memory, which Pierce didn’t really have; or a taste for the past and a delight in antiquity for its own picturesque sake, a quality Pierce’s father, Axel, certainly had, while lacking, to Pierce’s mind, anything that could be called a historical sense at all. Of course a vivid imagination was a help, and Pierce had that; as a student he had been able to browse happily amid statistical breakdowns of transalpine shipping in the sixteenth century or analyses of Viking boatbuilding techniques, because what he always saw proceeding in his mind was a drama, real men and women at real tasks, linked in the web of history of course but not conscious of that, men and women doing and saying, dreaming and playing, at once compelled absolutely to do what they had done (they were all dead, after all) and at the same time free in their moment, free to hope and regret and blame themselves for failure and thank God for success.

  But Pierce’s knack had shown itself long before that, long before he had very many historical facts to apply it to, an oddity of his brain which seemed so natural to him that he was full-grown before he was really aware of it: for Pierce Moffett, as far back as he could remember, numbers – the ten digits – had each a distinct color; and while he could perceive those colors in, say, telephone numbers or equations, they were most vivid to him when arranged in dates.

  Thus, the colors of his numbers became, without his choosing it, the colors of events – the colors of rooms where treaties were signed and swords surrendered, the colors of courts and coats and carriages, of mobs and massed armies, of the very air breathed; every century, every decade within that century, every year, was distinctively colored in his mind, bright panels of an unfolding Sunday comic. Like an infant musical prodigy effortlessly picking out tunes on the family cottage piano, Pierce was able to sort every odd fact that came his way, dates of battles, inventions, discoveries, things he gleaned from grownups’ talk, from advertisements, schoolbooks, almanacs, into a scheme within, a scheme that had always been there and only needed filling in.

  One had no color, was background only. Two was a deep green, somehow silken. Three was heraldic red, and four battle gray. Five was gold, six white; seven was a China blue, and eight black as antique evening dress. Nine was a dull beige. The nought was again colorless, though a dark vacancy where the one was a light vacancy. It was the first number – the number after the one, in dates after the first millennium A.D. – that determined the century color, and the next number the special color of the year; the last number was accent, glinting here and there in the tapestry. Thus some famous events were more present to his mind than others; 1066 had not much spectacle, but 1215 when the lords in green silken surcoats and gold chains sat down on the greensward with the gold-crowned king was an unforgettable scene. And 1235, when nothing much that he knew of had happened, was even more gorgeous, as was 1253, though that was a very different year.

  Like vast canvases by different masters using different palettes, the centuries hung separately in his mind, unmistakable for one another – except that they seemed to be labeled wrongly, or rather Pierce kept forgetting that the label to the right and not to the left referred to the picture he regarded. For the thirteenth century was red only in that designation; the fifteenth was not the beaten gold of 1500–1599 but the gray cloth of 1400–1499. So for a reason of his own Pierce had sometimes fallen into the common schoolboy error of naming his centuries wrongly; and still as an adult when he said ‘the eighteenth century’ he could not help sensing in the term only the very last years of it, when the blue silk frock coats and white wigs of, say, 1776, were going out, being changed for the glossy top hats and black worsted of the 1800s.

  He came to understand, of course, that the division of past time into centuries was artificial, that even ages which believed themselves to be altering at the century mark were in fact subject to forces far stronger than a mystical and even inaccurate numeration; but what mattered most in mastering history (as opposed to understanding it) was to have a clear hypothesis, a general picture, an account: a story, whose episodes flowed one from another, linked yet distinct, like chapters: the dark-golden fifteen-hundre
ds yielding to the marmoreal sixteens of reason and classicism, and then the seventeens come blue as Wedgwood, douceur de vivre, clear skies; the eighteens black with toil and piety, black as their soot and ink; lastly, the present century, tan as khaki, born from a clutch of brown eggs (1900) right on time. His color scheme in no wise clouded Pierce’s mind; he had a sure sense of the confusion and heterogeneity of human acts, varicolored, colorless, unsqueezable into any box, least of all the centuries; his system was a filing system only – but one that he had not invented but had found within himself automatically, his knack, his gift.

  Gifts can be frittered away. Child prodigies put aside their violins, bored or repelled. Pierce, laden with scholarships and expectations, left St. Guinefort’s – his Kentucky boarding school – and went up North to prestigious, machicolated Noate to study under Frank Walker Barr, a book of whose he had first read when he was eleven or twelve (was it Time’s Body? or Mythos and Tyrannos? He couldn’t remember at the interview) and who would become the latest of a series of fathers Pierce would revere, whose friendship he would find awkward, whose gaze he would avoid. He drifted into aestheticism, switched to a major in Renaissance Studies, lost a semester of his junior year in a romantic adventure (suicidal girl, flight to the Coast in a Greyhound, rejection, heartbreak), and although returning chastened, never quite fitted his wheels again to the track.

  He had lost, seemingly, his vocation (and felt a certain satisfaction at it, as though it had been baby fat or acne), but it was easy enough to knock around Noate in those years without one, not doing much of anything and living in town as though grown up; many of his friends, matriculated and not so matriculated, were doing it. It was not solely exculpation in Pierce that he would always think of himself as belonging to a sort of half-generation, born too late or too soon, falling continually between two stools. He had the idea that not many children had been conceived early in 1942, most potential fathers being then off to war, only those with special disabilities (like Pierce’s own) being left to breed. He was too young to be a beatnik; later, he would find himself too old, and too strictly reared, to be a success as a hippie. He came to consciousness in a moment of uneasy stasis, between existential and communal, psychoanalytic and psychedelic; and like many who feel themselves naked within, unfilled by notions, and without a plot, he clothed himself in a kind of puritanical dandyism, consisting mostly of an unwillingness to be pleased and black clothes of unidentifiable cut. He stood aloof in these clothes from a world he could not quite think how to criticize, and waited to see what would happen next.

  In fact even this minimal pose was not quite brought off. Dandies should be small and neat. Pierce was neither. He had been a large and ill-made child, and his ugliness as a teenager had bordered on the remarkable, six feet by his sixteenth birthday, a face of unsymmetrical hugeness very like Abe Lincoln’s, thick upshot hair, thick long-hanging wrists and clumsy splayed hands. Inside this frame there was someone small, even delicate, and deeply embarrassed by the ears on Pierce’s head, the rug on his chest; and though (like Lincoln’s) Pierce’s disabilities would begin to shape up into interesting qualities by his thirties and seem to promise an old age of rugged character, even craggy good looks, Pierce would never forget how repellent the small person within had always found him. Joli laid, his mother called him; his uncle Sam Oliphant (whom Pierce most resembled) translated this as ‘pretty ugly,’ and Pierce agreed. A little big and pretty ugly.

  Keeping out of the army played its part in drawing Pierce into graduate school at Noate, and avoiding the more arduous heights of scholarship occupied him there. Later on, when preparing himself to set out upon some standard tome as onto an arid sierra, Pierce would remember with chagrin how clever he had been, at Noate, in circumventing such work, in maintaining everyone’s good opinion of him without exactly justifying it, and in giving the impression of having acquired learning he had in fact only fingered lightly. Frank Barr hoped Pierce would do a thesis under his direction, perhaps taking up a theme Barr himself had wanted to pursue but had never been able to – he suggested the spread of Nestorian Christian churches in the Dark Ages, to India, China, black Africa: Marco Polo had come upon surviving congregations in Cathay, and myths of Issa, Jesus, could still be heard by astonished missionaries in the Sudan in the nineteenth century. What had they made out of the Christian story they carried so far, isolated through the centuries from Rome, from Byzantium? Fascinating. But Pierce, though intrigued (Barr could intrigue anyone), quailed before the labor involved, primary sources in six or eight languages, untrodden ground, expeditions in pith helmet and Land Rover for all he knew. He stayed with Renaissance Studies, though always sensing Barr’s never-expressed judgment; he discovered a collection of Elizabethan confessional literature at the Noate library (Seven Sobbes of a Sorrowful Soule for Sinne) and planned a brief, elegant thesis on these and their relation to certain themes in Shakespeare, particularly Measure for Measure, in his proposal making austerity a virtue (‘In restricting myself to this seemingly narrow compass,’ etc., etc., as though to do so had been a hard choice) and getting it accepted by a tolerant old fart in the English department. He also acquired a parrot. Teaching the parrot to talk (De mortuis nil nisi bunkum was what he got it to say) took up more of his time than the thesis.

  When his course work was completed, he made application, but no junior faculty position was offered to him at Noate.

  Taken by surprise – not because he had labored to be hired, for he had not, but he had taken it for granted that this future would be offered him as a matter of course and had never seriously considered the possibility of any other – Pierce packed his books and his black suits and the notes for his thesis with an unsettling sense that his luck had, for the moment, run out, that perhaps nothing, nothing at all, would happen next. The parrot was sent to live with Pierce’s father, Axel, in Brooklyn until Pierce settled down, and there it remained, year after year, in the south-facing window of Axel’s apartment, whistling, staring, disparaging. Pierce took temporary jobs at private schools, worked summers at a bookstore; he plugged, occasionally, at the damned thesis; and at the annual mass meetings of the academic association to which he retained membership he continued, along with hundreds (so it seemed) of fresher faces, to present himself to be looked over by the varsity scouts for whatever faculty positions were available. He felt caught out – lost sweetheart discovered at a slave market – when once in the midst of an immense ballroom ‘reception’ Frank Walker Barr put a hand on his shoulder, and invited him for a drink.

  ‘Specialization,’ Barr said when they had seated themselves on the cracked leather banquette of a paneled hotel bar, the professor’s choice. ‘That’s the great problem for scholars now. More and more about less and less.’

  ‘Hm,’ Pierce said. Barr before him was a series of rough ellipses, slope-shouldered torso, round bald head split by his wide grin, small almost browless eyes behind oval glasses. His hands encircled the pale cone of a dry martini, with an olive in it, which he had ordered with ritual care and was drinking with slow relish.

  ‘Understandable, of course,’ he went on. ‘Even inevitable, when so much new material continually surfaces, new methods of investigation are worked out. Computers. Amazing how the past continually enlarges, instead of shrinking with distance.’ He lifted the glass. There was a gold wedding band imbedded deep in the flesh of his ring finger. ‘Still,’ tiny sip completed, ‘little room now for the generalist. Unfortunate, if that’s where your talents lie.’

  ‘As yours do,’ Pierce said, lifting his nearly drained scotch to Barr.

  ‘So,’ Barr said. ‘Any nibbles? Offers you’re considering?’

  Pierce shrugged, raised eyebrows, shook head. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘when I was a kid I sort of thought that when I became a historian, what I would do, what historians did, was practice history – the way a doctor practices medicine. Maybe because the uncle I grew up with was a doctor. Have an office, or a shop . . .’

/>   ‘“Keep thy shop,”’ Barr said, ‘“and thy shop will keep thee.”’ He made in his throat the famous Barr chuckle, plummy, chocolaty. ‘Ben Franklin.’

  Pierce drank. In the dark of the bar, his old mentor was unreadable. Pierce was fairly sure that Barr’s kindly but justly lukewarm descriptio (couldn’t call it a recommendation) was chiefly what had kept Pierce from moving automatically into a slot at Noate, and thrown him on the open market. ‘How,’ he said, something – not the drink – warming his cheeks suddenly, ‘would you do it? Practice history. If there weren’t Noate.’

  Barr considered this a long time. The drink before him seemed to glow faintly, like a votive lamp before a Buddha. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that I would take some job, some job I was suited for – my father was a tailor, I worked for him – and I would listen, and discover what questions people asked, that history might answer, or help to answer, even if at first they didn’t seem to be historical questions; and I’d try to answer them. In a book, I suppose, probably, or maybe not.’

  ‘Questions like . . .’

  ‘Questions that come up. I remember there was an old woman who lived over my father’s shop. She read cards, told fortunes. She was a Gypsy, my father said, and that’s why people went to her. But why, I asked him, do people think Gypsies can tell fortunes? History could answer that. Give an account, you see.’ He set down his finished drink; his grin had begun again to grow, his chuckle to rumble in his throat. ‘The only trouble would be that damn tendency to generalism. I suppose that the first question I tried to answer would lead me to others, and those to others, and so on; and there being no publish-or-perish sort of pressure, no impetus to stop asking and start answering, I might go on forever. End up with the History of the World. Or a history, anyway.’ He took, with plump fingers, the olive from his glass, and chewed it thoughtfully. ‘Incomplete, probably, in the end. Unfinished. Oh, yes. But still I think I would consider myself to have been practicing history.’