XXIX. SLOPES
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Although a monster Geryon could be charming in company.
He made an attempt as they hurtled across Buenos Aires in a small taxi.
The two of them
were crushed into the back seat with their knees against their chests,
Geryon unpleasantly aware
of the yellowbeard’s thigh jolting against his own and of breath from the nipple.
He stared straight ahead.
The driver was out the window aiming a stream of rage at passing pedestrians
as the car shot across a red light.
He pounded the dashboard in joy and lit another cigarette, wheeling sharp left
to cut off a bicyclist
(who bounced onto the sidewalk and dove down a side street)
then veered diagonally in front
of three buses and halted shuddering behind another taxi. BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK.
Argentine horns sound like cows.
More blasphemy out the window. The yellowbeard was chuckling.
How’s your Spanish? he said to Geryon.
Not very good what about you?
Actually I am fairly fluent. I spent a year in Spain doing research.
Emotionlessness?
No, law codes. I was looking at the sociology of ancient law codes.
You are interested in justice?
I’m interested in how people decide what sounds like a law.
So what’s your favorite law code?
Hammurabi. Why? Neatness. For example? For example:
“The man who is caught
stealing during a fire shall be thrown into the fire.” Isn’t that good?—if
there were such a thing
as justice that’s what it ought to sound like—short. Clean. Rhythmical.
Like a houseboy.
Pardon? Nothing. They had arrived at the University of Buenos Aires.
The yellowbeard and the taxi driver
denounced one another for a few moments, then a pittance was paid over
and the taxi rattled off.
What is this place? said Geryon as they mounted the steps of a white concrete
warehouse covered with graffiti on the outside.
Inside it was colder than the winter air of the street. You could see your breath.
An abandoned cigarette factory, said the yellowbeard.
Why is it so cold?
They can’t afford to heat it. The university’s broke. The cavernous interior
was hung with banners.
Geryon photographed the yellowbeard beneath one that read
NIGHT ES SELBST ES
TALLER AUTOGESTIVO
JUEVES 18–21 HS
Then they made their way to a bare loft
called Faculty Lounge. No chairs. A long piece of brown paper nailed to the wall
had a list of names in pencil and pen.
Help Us Keep Track of Professors Detained or Disappeared, read the yellowbeard.
Muy impressivo, he said to a young man
standing nearby who merely looked at him. Geryon was trying to keep his eye
from resting on any one name.
Suppose it was the name of someone alive. In a room or in pain or waiting to die.
Once Geryon had gone
with his fourth-grade class to view a pair of beluga whales newly captured
from the upper rapids of the Churchill River.
Afterwards at night he would lie on his bed with his eyes open thinking of
the whales afloat
in the moonless tank where their tails touched the wall—as alive as he was
on their side
of the terrible slopes of time. What is time made of? Geryon said suddenly
turning to the yellowbeard who
looked at him surprised. Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction.
Just a meaning that we
impose upon motion. But I see—he looked down at his watch—what you mean.
Wouldn’t want to be late
for my own lecture would I? Let’s go.
Sunset begins early in winter, a bluntness at the edge of the light. Geryon
hurried after the yellowbeard
through dimming corridors, past students huddled in conversation who stubbed
their cigarettes underfoot
and did not look at him, to a bare brick-walled classroom with a muddle of small desks.
Empty one at the back.
It was a tight fit in his big overcoat. He couldn’t cross his knees. Presences hunched
darkly in the other desks.
Clouds of cigarette smoke moved above them, butts lay thick on the concrete floor.
Geryon disliked a room without rows.
His brain went running back and forth over the disorder of desks trying to see
straight lines. Each time finding
an odd number it jammed then restarted. Geryon tried to pay attention.
Un poco misterioso, the yellowbeard
was saying. From the ceiling glared seventeen neon tubes. I see the terrifying
spaces of the universe hemming me in.…
the yellowbeard quoted Pascal and then began to pile words up all around the terror
of Pascal until it could scarcely be seen—
Geryon paused in his listening and saw the slopes of time spin backwards and stop.
He was standing beside his mother
at the window on a late winter afternoon. It was the hour when snow goes blue
and streetlights come on and a hare may
pause on the tree line as still as a word in a book. In this hour he and his mother
accompanied each other. They did not
turn on the light but stood quiet and watched the night come washing up
towards them. Saw
it arrive, touch, move past them and it was gone. Her ash glowed in the dark.
By now the yellowbeard had moved
from Pascal to Leibniz and was chalking a formula on the blackboard:
[NEC] = A}B
which he articulated using the sentence “If Fabian is white Tomás is just as white.”
Why Leibniz should be concerned
with the relative pallor of Fabian and Tomás did not come clear to Geryon
although he willed himself
to attend to the flat voice. He noted the word necesariamente recurring four times
then five times then the examples
turned inside out and now Fabian and Tomás were challenging each other’s negritude.
If Fabian is black Tomás is just as black.
So this is skepticism, thought Geryon. White is black. Black is white. Perhaps soon
I will get some new information about red.
But the examples dried away into la consecuencia which got louder and louder as
the yellowbeard strode up and down
his kingdom of seriousness bordered by strong words, maintaining belief
in man’s original greatness—
or was he denying it? Geryon may have missed a negative adverb—and ended
with Aristotle who had
compared skeptic philosophers to vegetables and to monsters. So blank and
so bizarre would be
the human life that tried to live outside belief in belief. Thus Aristotle.
The lecture ended
to a murmur of Muchas gracias from the audience. Then someone asked a question
and the yellowbeard
began talking again. Everybody lit another cigarette and clenched down in the desks.
Geryon watched smoke swirl.
Outside the sun had set. The little barred window was black. Geryon sat wrapped
in himself. Would this day never end?
His eye traveled to the clock at the front of the room and he fell into the pool
of his favorite question.