Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (28 page)

Luther Penner was in a desperate and despairing mood when I first met him. We were both going to night school. I was studying history in preparation for the law, and he was taking literature courses with the idea of becoming an English teacher. Our bikes were one night parked next to one another in the rack. Penner had a soft tire and borrowed my pump. I’m like this tire, he said to me. Every morning I pump myself up only to leak slowly away all day—ssssssss—so by evening I’m soft like this—flat, and unable to function. I made no memorable reply, but the way Penner had hissed—with soft insistence—remained in my mind. I joked that perhaps he should carry a pump around with him as I was doing, and he laughed, turning from his task to gaze at me with disconcerting fullness. Ah … by evening I’ve run out of lies.

He greeted me with a smile and nod next night, and proposed
we wheel our bikes to a nearby coffee shop for talk. I was pleased to agree, as he’d been pleased to hear I was presently studying the Renaissance. The perfect period, he said.
Then
, he said,
then
there were ghosts and gods;
then
there were men. And Italian, the language of the mafioso, of opera, of revenge, of
maledizione
, was in the process of freeing itself from Latin. Had I much knowledge yet of Caterina Sforza, that dear and devoted woman whose memory he cherished? I said I thought “dear and devoted” were hardly the right words for a will as unbending as hers, and Penner stopped stirring his coffee to hold up a damp spoon. Oh, dear and devoted, she was, he exclaimed, devoted to
la vendetta
! When her second husband, Giacomo Feo—to whom, by the way, she was also dearly devoted—when he was murdered on the road, set upon by assassins at the rear of her own cortège—it was returning from a hunt—and Caterina had to scamper to her castle like a rodent—much in grief, more in rage—you remember?—she returned like a tiger, putting scores of conspirators, their friends and families, to death, and many others to torture and imprisonment. She had the wife and children of the principal plotter thrown down a well previously appointed with spikes. And her own firstborn—a weakling like me—because she had observed the child’s jealousy of his stepfather, Feo—she incarcerated just in case.

Luther Penner’s speech, punctuated by pauses, and conducted with his spoon, though itself not normally vehement, was accompanied by an intensity in the set of the jaw and a squint to the eyes which was quite striking. Soft-spoken and deferential with strangers, he held forth confidently, candidly, at length, when he felt he was among friends, a state he sensed existed between the two of us from the first. Near the end, he told me that he believed he’d seen a white flag flutter across my person that first night. If so, it was the last of those early envisionments.

We sat, that night, in the middle of a brightly waxed and Formica’d room with the traditional clunky white diner mugs in front of us, and talked of history and my interest in politics (a concern of which Penner jokingly disapproved). His fingers raised hell with a paper napkin, and he tended to stare into his coffee while he talked. When he listened, though, his head came up, and his eyes tried to lock on yours. He seemed wholly oblivious to everyone else in the place.

His spoon—in this sort of “joint” his spoon had to be pale, short, and plastic—his spoon could become quite aerially active, but his spoon was not employed to whirlpool cream or encourage sugar to dissolve, because he liked his coffee black and strong (caffeine was the only drug he could tolerate); still it might flick droplets on your person or lightly tattoo the table or illustrate the fast passage of an idea from one context to another. He drove his spoon through the air like a taxi in traffic.

Since my aim here is to elucidate Penner’s ideas and describe their development, I shall omit what I told him about myself and what I was then thinking; these omissions will unfortunately make our conversations seem one-sided, as if Penner were wholly preoccupied with his own notions and given to extended monologues and nervous stirrings of his coffee. Although it is true that Luther Penner rarely strayed from his single subject, it is also true that he questioned me frequently about my own life and about my plans and opportunities, and that he listened with a diligent attention to what I said, and furthermore remembered it, reintroducing one of my memories into our conversation as if it were one of his, and frequently finding food for his thought in dishes I had set out, saying “I can make a meal of that” when I had uttered some opinion or concluded some story.

Naturally, it would not be sensible to reproduce the repetitions, backtrackings, or hems and haws of our conversations
(which were normal, I think, in these respects), let alone observe the frequent silences which fell between us while I waited for him to complete a thought.

He told me that first night only that he was building a theology based on the idea of vengeance, but, he said, he didn’t know me well enough yet to risk my laughter. I denied all possibility of mirth. Naturally you protest, he said, but if the cock crows to discomfit Paul, it will crow and discomfit anybody. Then he surprised me by asking, as we prepared to leave: do you know what Seneca says about retribution? I said I thought not. If you think not, you know not, Penner said, smiling so there’d be no reproof.

Well, Seneca says:
Scelera non ulciseris, nisi vincis
. I had no idea, I reply, honestly enough. And you still haven’t, have you, Penner said, a bit peevishly. You can’t be a lawyer and not know Latin.

After a bit, it became our habit to meet after class, wheel our bikes along the walk out of the college while talking about what had just taken place on Saint Bartholomew’s Eve or about “the fair field of folke” Penner was ploughing through, according to the schoolboy joke. At Cow’s Lick Café (so called because its owner had one), we would center ourselves as we had that first night, smack in the middle of the glare, where Luther would stir his coffee almost out of the mug and gradually admit me to his universe.

God said “Lucifer” first. Penner pointed his dripping spoon at one of the blazing overhead lights and then at their reflection from cabinets and counters and floors, from fat mugs and white faces. So Lucifer thought he was … was first, was foremost, was of all created things … the boss. He was the angel of clarity, regardless of the cost, of purity and unconcealment, of everything naked and shining—the bare breast, the fishes’ scales—and of immediacy, too, he flew so fast—here to there in only a
t
. Indeed, he was the first sun of God (Luther’s grin
slowed him down so I could catch up with his puns), and he revealed himself in the morning as a star.

You might say it was a case of hubris in the highest which brought Lucifer down, but he had cause to be confused. All seemed clear to him, for he was clarity itself, he was light. Though he was not consubstantial with the Deity, he was still first in form and fact below that rank. He went anywhere and everywhere with amazing immediacy. And in each everywhere he was the cause of sight, of understanding, of life. I’d have forgiven him his pride. But God kicked him out of the sky for his presumption. Lucifer’s light became fire as he fell, as though he were a meteor entering the atmosphere. The pale spoon spun out of control into the cup.

So he burned into the core of the earth, melting it like lead in a smelter, and now and then he shakes it, or it erupts, for he is still boiling mad after a zillion years. God dishonored His first creation, His son’s shine, and made him hide in the ground, where he lurked like a locust. When Lucifer flew into the caverns which became Hell, the universe went dark once more, chaos returned, reasoning was impossible. God had to do many things over again. This time He made a lot of little lights like Gabriel, who has to polish his armor to achieve a gleam, and who is dim as a grimy dime when he’s not wearing it.

But if “Let there be Light” was a mistake, “Let there be lights to the number of the bugs” was a catastrophe.

Except for the occasional smile to bemedal an especially smart remark, what Penner said was said with simple seriousness, even gravely, particularly when he drew consequences, like lengths of knotted hankies, from the sleeves of sacred texts.

The soul is that inner gleam which enables us to see, to understand, to reason as I am doing now, to shine from one thought to another. It used to be called “the candle of the Lord.”
You won’t believe it, but I have seen that light. Our little Lucifer. Yes, yours too, I think. That first night.

Reason, you know, is the one real enemy of God. Reason is the Great Satan.

Penner had a disorderly jam of teeth like flotsam on a beach, but he did not hide his mouth behind his hand, and his smile was broad and his grin wide. They gave a certain meaning to his words which his words by themselves never had, as if his sentences had seeped through several openings—as if they had been sieved. He was already losing the hair on the top of his head, and would soon look tonsured, which seemed suitable to me—to wear a halo of hair.

Lucifer insisted on behaving like a Lord of Hosts, and many of the lesser, later angels followed his lead. He was, after all, the first word, the first deed, the seed of all sense. God really wanted Lucifer to deceive himself and accept a lesser station. Yet how could Light pretend to Darkness? Well, many angels went with him when he fell. There was a shower of them like a torrent of stars. The tormented flutter which came from the descending host created a great wind. Planets were blown from their orbits. Mountains lost their tops and through these holes the angels fell like thrown stones. The resulting winds ran like rivers through the universe, and are still the source of all streaming air—the breath of beating wings. Angels kept arriving in hell for eons after, plashing down into lakes of fire like tardy geese.

This was revealed to you too? along with the sight of the soul’s inner light?

And you said you’d be more reliable than Peter.

I didn’t say I doubted or denied.

You im……plied.

During the ensuing weeks we discussed such oddly assorted
subjects as the Wife of Bath and the machinations of Pope Sixtus IV, the idea of a pilgrimage, and the Pazzi conspiracy,
The Rape of Lucrece
and the siege of Siena. Shakespeare, Penner claimed, takes a revenge upon his readers which is so subtle and so artfully wrought they never feel its bite. “To take arms against a sea of troubles” was an idiot’s activity, and not likely to end anything, and a line like “To stamp the seal of time in aged things” was pompous, repetitive, and empty beyond belief, yet readers were led by his art to fancy the music such lines made, to repeat them for pleasure, and feel them profound, which demonstrated the readers’ own shallow standards instead, and how easily led down the rhetorical path their ears and minds and hearts were. It was a revenge by the great writer of the sweetest sort.

After our coffees, we would push our bikes back to the rack, and go our separate ways from there, so our conversations tended to have a tripartite structure: first Chaucer or Pazzi, then Lucifer and treason, finally worries, hurts, and hopes. Penner was planning something in regard to his English instructor, who, he said, had resisted certain of Luther’s interpretations in a publicly scornful way. As the term’s end neared, I asked him what he’d done to redeem his honor. Oh, he exclaimed, it was easy. Always count on the weaknesses of your prey, for that is what makes them fair game. He had simply cited, in his final paper, a number of nonexistent sources to support his views, and the instructor, one Claude Hoch, had failed to challenge any of them. Surely, Luther said to me with his toothy smile and syrupy tone, surely you have read that splendid book on
The Canterbury Tales
by Nikki Quay D’Orsay? Sugar gave way to gravel. The ignoramus who is supposed to be teaching me Chaucer didn’t bat an eye at so openly outrageous a fabrication. Well, a snook for his snoot.

Under ordinary conditions, Penner was a truth teller, but he
was inclined to let rhetoric enlarge his assertions. I noticed this for the first time when we were discussing the Pazzi conspiracy, interesting mainly because the Pope was the principal plotter of that miserable enterprise. It failed and two subsequent attempts on Lorenzo the Magnificent, like fading rings around the tread of a water bug, were equally inept. Frescobaldi and his hired assassins were hanged from the windows of the Bargello, two to a window, Penner said, like drapes.

I tried to envision it. Unfortunately, I was able; sadly, it was easy.

During these days my mind was a jumble of examples, Luther supplying most, but I stirred in my share. I saw designs in the scud of clouds, underhandedness in every hello, a widespread scheme in the smallest exchange.

Lucifer, Luther said, as he elaborated his Genesis for me, may have been guilty, but he has, ever since, felt unjustly punished, and has nursed his grudge like a sucking calf. Good and Evil are like the family feuds between the Hatfields and McCoys, or the Montagues and the Capulets. Rejected, tossed aside, light began to burn, to consume instead of illuminate, and Lucifer became Satan, the Prince for those who would even the score—or go beyond the game the way the Duc de Guise did, who felt, like
Hamlet
’s Claudius, that “revenge should have no bounds.” That’s Seneca again. But by overstepping the bounds, by unevening things, as vendettas are inclined to do, the dreadful Duc earned and deserved the same fate as those he had massacred. Still, few retributions have been so thorough and carried out on such a scale as that of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, when, according to Lord Acton, whom we must believe, over two thousand Prots were piked or otherwise killed in Paris. Isn’t it Sully who says no person ever exacted as severe a vengeance as the Duc de Guise for his father’s murder?

Light was so redundant in this place I thought of it as light’s
last stand. The café echoed and my eyes heard. So you believe the Biblical account? I believe the Bible as semaphore—as encoded poetry—and what deep signals it sends—Penner replied. It’s written in wonderful “as it weres”—in brilliant
als obs
. The Big Book depicts—doesn’t it?
—the
moral world—I mean a world where every enterprise has its ethical price and every stone and bone and grommet its moral worth. In the same way the stage mocks our ordinary life. In front of painted flats, fakes in costume mimic our dreadful deeds, yet the moment the deed is done, the deed redounds; it replicates itself like a shout in a canyon; it bounces back upon the doer like a serve returned. Penner’s spoon ticks metronomically. Is that the way it happens here among us commoners? Remember Uzzah’s fate? a lowly soldier, unsanctified, touches the Ark of the Covenant while preventing that most sacred of symbols from falling off the rear of a rocking cart into the mud and dust of a rutted road. Uzzah, the salvator, is struck dead in thrice less twice. He broke a rule. Lightning, all fire and light, is ignorant and indifferent about what it fingers. The spoon points and spears.