Schoen reluctantly raised his hand.
“Yes?” the doctor asked.
“This disproportion is a sign of degeneracy,” Schoen said.
The doctor shook his head. “No. Not at all. Degeneracy would suggest that people characterized by such disproportion once occupied a higher position in the hagiology of race, a position from which they somehow degenerated. No, gentlemen, this is not a case of degeneracy, but a case of … arrested development.”
The vermin stared straight ahead, his eyes avoiding the gaze of the students.
Schoen leaned toward Langhof’s ear. “This is an excellent way to present the facts,” he whispered.
Below, the human orrery bent his knees, raised his arms, flared his nostrils on command as the doctor moved through the cosmology of race.
“It is so clear!” Schoen said enthusiastically. “I never thought it could be demonstrated so clearly.”
Langhof’s head snapped around. “Be quiet, Schoen,” he hissed.
Sitting here now on my verandah, as I watch the river take its course, I wonder if it was cruel to speak so curtly to the imbecile Schoen. Here in the Republic — except of course in the northern provinces and certain chambers within the district prisons — no one speaks cruelly to anyone. The people are numbed by constant allusions to their greatness, their nobility, their destiny. El Presidente infuses the nation with grandeur while, on a lesser scale, Esperanza brings the consciousness of God to bear on the villagers’ running sores. Harmless illusions. Comforting illusions. In the Camp we made a factory of such ideas and piped our delusions up four square chimneys.
Schoen, rebuked, turned quickly away and held his eyes firmly on the scientific proof coming to a close at the front of the amphitheater.
“Well, gentlemen,” the doctor said, “I hope this presentation has been of help to you. It is important that these matters be kept in mind.” He paused, watching the students. “Are there any questions?”
The room was silent.
“Very well, then,” the doctor said. He took his notes from the lectern and tucked them snugly under his arm. Then he turned, his eyes catching those of the vermin who stood motionlessly before him. And at that moment, something of the past, something of a nobler and kinder world rose quite accidentally within him, odd and out of place, astonishing as an open book on a hangman’s scaffold. It was a simple gesture: he bowed quickly to the vermin, in the same courtly way with which he might have excused himself from a men’s club. “Thank you,” he said.
The vermin stared at him, his eyes taking on a certain incomprehensible light, as if with a mere clapping of his hands he might suddenly change all of this, as if the amphitheater, the grinning, black-booted students, the contrived biology were as frail as papier-mache, a stage set for some outlandish farce upon which, for some perverse reason, the curtain refused to fall.
In the Royal Chapel that rests within the shadow of the Tower of London, the lords and ladies of the realm came to pray before they were executed. Victims of court intrigue, ensnared by their ambition, they yet retained a certain reverence for style. And so they came to this small, elegant chapel, dressed in their finest attire, looking like the splendid lords and ladies of the court. And here, in the Royal Chapel, they bowed their heads in futile prayer. The block stood outside the chapel door, and beside it, the executioner in his black hood. He must have heard their mutterings, must have heard the soft crinkle of the great, broad skirts as the ladies bowed, then rose, must have heard the muffled pad of their stockinged feet as they moved toward the door, then opened it to face him. At that moment he must have seen their eyes widen, then contract, as they watched his hooded head or stared at the broadaxe nestled in his arms. Did he nod to them? Did he bow? Did he perhaps say, from beneath the anonymity of the hood, “Thank you, my lady, for not detaining me too long”?
The vermin nodded politely to the doctor and stared at him, hollow-eyed. Then two officers stepped forward briskly, each taking one of the vermin’s arms, and escorted him from the room.
“Please forgive my rudeness,” Schoen said to Langhof in that groveling manner of his.
Langhof watched the vermin disappear behind the door at the front of the room. The doctor remained near his lectern, his eyes perusing a large chart upon which the human skeleton was displayed.
Doubtless, there are certain moments in certain human lives when the intelligence, formerly scattered and disconnected, suddenly forms itself into a thin, firm blade and begins the process of ripping into all the vagaries and seductions that surround it. Proust bites into a madeleine or stumbles on uneven paving stones, and the world shifts into focus. A man is walking with his child, the child lurches from the curb in front of a passing automobile, and suddenly the man sees each person’s isolation, each person’s helplessness, sees the mechanics of faith and the structure of purpose dissolve before his eyes. There was nothing to seize the child or swerve the car. Nothing. Only the impact of matter against matter, a child’s head against a headlight; only metal moving at a certain velocity toward the delicate tissue of brain and bone. At such a moment, even the least lonely feels utterly alone. What is left is only the sullen recognition and an overwhelming sadness.
But was it this emasculating sadness that Langhof felt as he stood among his fellows and watched the vermin disappear behind the great oak door of the amphitheater?
No. Not sadness. Not pity. Only the terror that comes with the first, awesome comprehension of our infinite capacity for contradictions: the hard, irreducible fact that a man could humiliate another man with a wooden pointer and yet retain the sense of high civility that decrees a polite bow and a crisp “Thank you” at the end of the display. It seemed to Langhof that a creature capable of such ideological gymnastics was truly fearful. For if the Special Section doctor was capable of such ambidexterousness, who else might be capable of it? Schoen? Of course. Trottman? Yes. But what about Goethe? Beethoven? The scientist in our hero affirmed the undeniable, that it is a universal capacity. Nor was it only a question of ignorance. Schoen might be overwhelmed by the imbecilic biology of the regime, but no one, it seemed to Langhof, could claim immunity from this greater lunacy.
Given this new recognition, what was our frightened philosopher to do? Perhaps he could announce his discovery — run about in the streets, grab astonished pedestrians by their shirt collars, shake them, shout in their faces, “Can’t you see? It’s not safe to be in this world! It’s not safe to live among us! Men are not only stupid, they are inconsistent!” How trite an observation, how comic. How horrible its implications.
What, then, did our hero of the intellect do with this frightening new intelligence?
Nothing. Except to pursue the science of hygiene and carefully brush the twin lightning bolts on his uniform lapel.
FATHER MARTINEZ lightly brushes the shoulder of his cassock as he creaks up the stairs of my verandah. At the top he leans on a briar cane that he hopes will someday be an archbishop’s crosier. He smiles. “These stairs are becoming more difficult for me, it seems.”
I point to the chair opposite me. “Rest yourself, Father.”
Father Martinez struggles over to the chair and eases himself into it. A rim of dust coats his upper lip like a faint, brown mustache. “I hope I find you well, Don Pedro,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Good, good,” Father Martinez says. He nods slowly, rhythmically, like the tolling of a bell. He watches me for a moment but says nothing. What he wishes to know he will never ask: How did you end up in the Camp? What did you see? Dear God, what did you do?
The silence grows awkward and he breaks it. “How is Dr. Ludtz? I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing him in quite some time.”
“He has a slight fever, I’m afraid.”
“Fever, yes,” Father Martinez says. “It’s going around the whole province.” He takes his shovel hat and places it on his lap. There is only a hint of gray in his hair, for he is not an old man, though he would like to be one. For him, the idea of the aging, kindly priest serves as the perfect symbol of holiness. He wishes to age into saintliness, to grow ancient in the jungle, so that his long years of selflessness and humility might be noticed by his papal superiors.
“You are well, Father?” I ask.
“Me? Yes, of course.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“Of course, the fever is rampant in the village. We’ve even had some problems with hallucinations. The fever
