The Vanishing (Spoorloos)

For whatever reason – I don't sleep much as it is – I have always been plagued by the most vivid nightmares. I know this because I happen to remember most of the horror in those first magical moments of wakefulness when we straddle two realms and our imagination is not hemmed by logic's straight black stitch. Sometimes, in a weak moment of conformity, I have attempted to describe in writing what was seen and experienced; and yet time and again the hypnopompic mark crumbles when committed to paper. It has taken me a while to realize that our nightmares are reflected in what fragments remain from those visions, as well as in the startling daily reminders of what we thought were memories. And one of the most believable nightmares ever told is the subject of this remarkable film.    

You will know the premise: a young Dutch couple still struggling with the reality of their growing love travels southbound to a beach's distant bliss. Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) seems the more confident of their relationship, perhaps because she could be considered more attractive and insouciant than the rather uptight Rex (Gene Bervoets). Soon, however, a spat ensues – like most spats, over absolutely nothing that could invalidate the relationship's strength – and Saskia reveals that last night she again had her recurring nightmare. It is an unusual fear, one that would be termed claustrophobia by the casual observer, but we will not belittle it so, even if another character later on will claim the same illness. Saskia's nightmare involves being trapped in a "golden egg" (the title of the original Dutch novel) hurtling through outer space with neither escape nor a sense of where, if anywhere, she might be headed. In this nightmare's last manifestation, she becomes conscious of a second egg, with presumably someone else trapped within. "And I knew somehow that if these two ever collided, it would all be over," she tells Rex with all the conviction one may reasonably attach to such a vision. Rex will not take her very seriously, which leads to our first red herring. There is also a lovely moment when the two golden eggs just mentioned flash before us in the form of a giant truck's headlights in a tunnel where the lovers seem to have run out of petrol. Rex abandons the car and a wailing Saskia to hoof it with his gas tank. When he returns, she is gone; but a part of him knows that she probably just scampered off to the end of the tunnel with her flashlight. As he finds her there in a bright, iconic shot that will be repeated towards the close of our story, we all become strangely relieved: we already believe in this couple. And we may believe in them even more because we know that the end is hideously near.        

That end, of course, is simply the beginning of a much longer and more wicked nightmare. It is July of 1984 and we are in the idyll of a vacationing France. Our narrative pulse, so to speak, will be what usually happens in France in July, namely the most famous cycling competition in the world. The Tour has another function apart from dating our work, and that function has to do with an enigmatic French professor of chemistry, Raymond Lemorne (the late Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), one of the most magnificent creations of literature or film. The Donegaled Lemorne is so magnificent, in fact, that one suspects Krabbé might have personally known a middle-class family man of extraordinary intelligence just like Lemorne and imagined for him a sinister secondary existence. We first see Lemorne as he fits a fake cast onto his right forearm and hangs out in front of a highway gas station scanning for – well, we don't quite know yet, although it is clear that a plot of some sort is afoot. As our story progresses, Lemorne assumes a number of beveled facets. At the not-so-tender age of sixteen he determined that he was a man of action (a rather stupid explanation for this epiphany is provided, although its location is far more interesting than its outcome), which allows him to rescue a drowning girl in front of his admiring daughters and generally kowtowing wife ("Never trust a hero," he warns. "A hero is capable of rash gestures"). Whether measuring the effects of chloroform, practicing his accosting monologues in three languages, or slinking around his car after luring a victim inside, Donnadieu is a revelation. "Perhaps you can help me," he reads off his English flash cards in his thick, ridiculous accent and bifocals (much like how this famous French playwright allegedly learned the language), his fat finger pointed at an imaginary target of his planned abduction. 

An abduction? Yes, you see, when Saskia enters a gas station on a French highway and never reappears, we do not slip seamlessly into a police procedural or even a psychological study of poor Rex. Instead, our thoughts and eyes are transposed to a thoroughly bourgeois family of four and their little games, mostly because Lemorne is clearly our killer and Saskia is clearly the meaningless victim of a deranged man's war with his own rapidly deteriorating psyche. What Lemorne proposes as a motivation for his crimes is a direct progeny of the banal Superman nonsense spawned more than a century ago, and needs no further belaboring. But the theories that justify evil are always the vague, hollow mottoes of the sophist. So when three years have passed and a completely obsessed Rex, with a new girlfriend in name only, begins once again to plea with the general public for help in locating Saskia, the whole business catches Lemorne's eye. We learn Rex, Saskia, and Lemorne's full names and addresses; we even learn Lemorne's birthday, which just so happens also to be the director's. We observe real people, not unattractive but pleasant to behold, well-spoken, and party to secrets that may destroy them, and in these obsessive souls we recognize the bitter flavor of utter plausibility. When Lemorne looks distracted as he picks up his younger daughter from the train station, she asks him whether he has a mistress ("You're allowed to, at your age, daddy"). And when he refuses a harmless offer for coffee with his daughters' former volleyball coach who has just caught him nervously loitering in front of his car, she is just as blunt but not quite as gentle ("Mr. Lemorne, you can go to any gas station. There you will find hundreds of foreign women and no one will recognize you"). Lemorne, of course, takes her up on her advice, but not for the reasons she insinuates.

Much is made of evil genius because evil without genius is the bestial thuggery of the Mafia goon. But rarely if ever do we encounter malevolence of this caliber extending its roots into the earth and feeding off the nutrients in its immediate environment. The ingenuity of The Vanishing resides not only in its wholly unconventional unraveling of the truth, but also in the truth itself. We are not given hints at what happened that fateful July day until some eleventh-hour tying of every loose thread imaginable, we are inundated with every angle of the truth. Lemorne may be the first self-proclaimed sociopath on screen who is neither overly excitable nor overly calm in his emotions: he goes through the highs and lows of a normal person, but close inspection reveals that he is completely insane. His plan, which fails gloriously and repeatedly, is so unnecessarily risky and yet so "untraceable" (the Dutch name for the film literally means "without a trace") if carried out well, that we understand we are dealing with someone who has never once cared for societal standards or consequences. He has made his own pact with his will and is determined to see it to the end. His methods recall the Tour itself: standing by a rushing mass, hoping to glimpse a single specimen. In searching for Saskia minutes after her disappearance Rex, who has very good French, even mistakenly says that Saskia is in a jersey not a blouse, and is corrected by the French cashier who alludes, quite naturally, to the Tour and the maillot jaune. And the two bicycles stolen from Rex's car rack as he looks for Saskia? Both of them gone, I fear, without the slightest trace.

Accidental Death of an Anarchist

Nolimus aut velimus, omnibus gentibus, justitiam et veritatem.

                                                                                                                    Saint Gregory   

Politics is superior to art; at least that is what those who worship the ebb and flow of governments and nations would like us to believe. It is superior because everything, absolutely everything, can be reduced to money and power; in fact, the only real debate in this world bereft of godliness, sanctity and hope, is whether money has more allure than power or vice versa. Occasionally you will even hear the moneyed and powerful, who have the terrible tendency of inhabiting the same mortal forms, talk about how they bestow more upon society. To a man, they opine, they pay more taxes; they invest their money in technology for the good of humanity and not just to satiate their own megalomania and gadget fetish; and yet – heaven be praised – their quenchless greed eventually trickles down the lowly and oppressed, who cannot really anticipate earning as much as the elite because that elite studied for years precisely not "to be treated in the same terms as some half-starved old age pensioner." This argument may sound quite familiar, while the quote is from this famous play.

We should not expect much in terms of plot from such a title, but we would do well to consider the historical context if only because translations have often abandoned it. In the years of upheaval that our parents now consider radical and we wince upon, the inherent moral corruption of a theory propounded by two nineteenth-century German thinkers who really did  very little thinking at all (despite the fact that one of them spoke twenty-five languages) was exposed, carved up like the Elwetritsch it resembled, and stuffed for mounting, where, I should add, it has since remained. In its stead came a new brand of aid to the underprivileged that espoused fairness, competition and, most importantly, restrictions to personal wealth. Why this last point? Because recent history had evinced that we know few bounds and that, for some, bounds are signs of weakness. What Northern Europe accomplished in the 1960s and 1970s is so remarkable yet so obvious that we must have been mad not to have shunted our train onto this progressive track years ago. That would explain why the protagonist and grand magician in the play is known by many names in dialog but only one in stage directions, Il Matto (the Maniac or Madman).

There is an inherent difference between a maniac and madman that I shall not belabor; suffice it to say that our Matto has elements of both categories, in other words, he is sufficiently keen on his aims as to seem obsessed and sufficiently separated from conventional wisdom as to seem absurd. What links a maniac and a madman, however, can be broadly defined as risk. At the play's onset our Matto is bent on frustrating an interrogator who cannot keep pace with his wit, the policemen soon convinced that he is in fact one of them infiltrating the force as a sort of internal affairs ruse. Knowing that they can trust no one fully, they acquiesce to the Matto's game and allow him to run the rather terrible risk of getting them all killed. But that is, in a way, precisely what he seeks, and his target first appears to be a recently diseased anarchist:

Let's hope your employers don't find out you're an anarchist. Know what I mean? Otherwise bang goes your job on the railways ... And naturally he gets depressed. To tell the truth, anarchists are very attached to their jobs. Basically they're just petty bourgeois attached to their little creature comforts: regular income every month, Christmas bonus, pension, health insurance, a peaceful old age. Believe me, there's no one like your anarchist for planning for his old age; I'm referring to your present-day anarchists, of course, your wishy-washy anarchists, not the real anarchists of yesteryear, the ones who were 'hounded by persecution from one country to the next.'

Anarchists, we come to learn, are actually very much like the petit bourgeois that socialism was actually trying to protect, never mind the rhetoric espoused by leftist pundits. They are average, frightened by the perils of the world, set in their ways, and married to the notion that there is only so much they can do to advance. Their only hope lies in the fact that these characteristics could easily pertain to the vast majority of humanity, however poor and downtrodden, however isolated or neglected. And they are anarchists because the world order in which they live has not planned much for their survival.

But I have avoided the plot for long enough. On December 15, 1969 a Milanese railroad worker by the name of Pinelli, recently arrested for his alleged participation in a terrorist bombing, found his fatal way out a fourth-floor window. He was not arrested at random: since 1944 Pinelli had been a committed anarchist, although a description of his life will not conjure up ideas of chaos and ruthless revolt. In fact, when one reads that Pinelli studied that bland, artificial and completely tasteless equalizer Esperanto, led a fulfilling life as a worker and publisher of articles regarding workers' rights, got married and enjoyed a quiet family existence, one understands the Matto to be anything but mad. Our Matto is bent on proving police and judicial complicity in Pinelli's demise, and to that end he convinces the other characters (Sports Jacket, Superintendent, Journalist, and the only named figure, Inspector Bertozzo) that his aim is to ensure their innocence in the eyes of the law. He also concocts a rather elaborate explanation of what really happened that cold December evening:

It is rumored that during the anarchist's final interrogation, at just a couple of minutes to midnight, one of the officers present started to get impatient, and he came over and gave him a mighty wallop on the back of the neck ... Relax, Inspector ... The result of this was that the anarchist was half-paralyzed and started struggling for breath. So they decided to call him an ambulance. In the meantime, in an attempt to revive him, they opened the window, put the anarchist in front of it, and made him lean out a bit for the cool night air to revive him. Apparently there was a misunderstanding between the two officers supporting him; as often happens in these cases, each of them thought the other one was holding him. 'You got him, Gianni?' 'You got him, Luigi?' And bomp, down he went.

Why does this description resemble slapstick comedy? Perhaps because that is the only arena in which such a scene could be acknowledged as plausible. Although heavy-handed at times, Fo's work transcends the usual pedantry of satire and begins to graze the fantastic. Surely an anarchist could in fact decide that all is lost and hurl himself towards a concrete grave? Surely an anarchist would be the first suspect on a list of endless suspects and endless crimes that for some inexplicable reason continue to elude Milanese law enforcement officials? Surely paraphrasing a pope, with the omission of two very important words, displays little more than needless erudition? Or perhaps it means that, in time, the truth surfaces from the bottom of every cesspool. Whether we like it or not.    

The Tractate Middoth

Once upon a time, an educated Western man could be counted on to know Latin and quite possibly some Greek ("as much Greek as he could get his hands on" to paraphrase this author). Hebrew, generally reserved for those in theology, was no less valuable in its contributions to our understanding of the world and its reasons. And while the educated Westerner might have told you marvelous things about the etymology of terms in his Old Testament, he would have been blissfully ignorant of the first monotheism's parallel development, its mystics and conundrums now overshadowed by the horizon of the Cross. These times have changed, of course, and now a uniform ignorance of all ancient languages sadly does not seem to trouble most people. So the antiquarians among us rejoice when people occasionally bother to acknowledge the importance of the oldest alphabets, if not exactly conduct a second-hand survey in translation of their riches. What good does a knowledge of these texts entail? Apart from the philosophies of the Greeks, which are as eternal as the earth itself, what wisdom from these occult ages could possibly inform our modern sensibilities? You may be amazed at the answer, which in no small way should influence your appreciation of this famous story.

Our initial character will make only a brief appearance, then resurface at a crucial juncture much later on. That personage is one John Eldred, "an elderly man with a thin face and grey Piccadilly weepers" (a term regrettably faded from use) who one autumn afternoon finds his way into a "certain famous library." His aim is the acquisition of an old Hebrew tome; his manners are cordial and almost unctuous; and his disposition in general seems to be that of precisely the person who would want to peruse an early eighteenth-century Talmudic work in the original language. He is helped in his endeavor by young Mr. Garrett, a employee of the library who deems the initial task ("Talmud: Tractate Middoth, with the commentary of Nachmanides, Amsterdam, 1707, 11.3.34")  a simple job to round off his day and proceeds to the Hebrew section only to find that the book has just been loaned to a "shortish old gentleman, perhaps a clergyman, in a cloak." And while he is mildly surprised by the speed at which old Eldred accepts this twist of fate and scurries off towards the exit, he is rather shocked to find upon reexamination that the tome in question is in fact quite securely seated in its shelf. 

What happens next is a sequence I have to spoil, as good Mr. Garrett ends up quite unconscious in that selfsame section. He relates his excursion to a colleague who helped find and revive him:

'I went into that Hebrew class to get a book for a man that was inquiring for it down below. Now that same book I'd made a mistake about the day before. I'd been for it, for the same man, and made sure that I saw an old parson in a cloak taking it out. I told my man it was out: off he went, to call again next day. I went back to see if I could get it out of the parson: no parson there, and the book on the shelf. Well, yesterday, as I say, I went again. This time, if you please – ten o'clock in the morning, remember, and as much light as ever you get in those classes – and there was my parson again, back to me, looking at the books on the shelf I wanted. His hat was on the table, and he had a bald head. I waited a second or two looking at him rather particularly. I tell you, he had a very nasty bald head. It looked to me dry, and it looked dusty, and the streaks of hair across it were much less like hair than cobwebs. Well, I made a bit of a noise on purpose, coughed and moved my feet. He turned round and let me see his face – which I hadn't seen before. I tell you again, I'm not mistaken. Though, for one reason or another I didn't take in the lower part of his face, I did see the upper part; and it was perfectly dry, and the eyes were very deep-sunk; and over them, from the eyebrows to the cheek-bone, there were cobwebs – thick. Now that closed me up, as they say, and I can't tell you anything more.'   

Ah, but we can. Garrett takes a well-deserved vacation to the seaside only to faint again in his train compartment upon the sight of "a figure so like one bound with recent unpleasant associations." He is nursed by "the only passenger in the carriage," a certain Mrs. Simpson, and her unmarried daughter. Unlike other good Samaritans these two ladies suppose that Garrett might repay their kindness by solving a long-standing family mystery, one involving an old book and two contradictory testaments authored by an evil uncle whose requested method of burial is the stuff of travel guides. To make Mrs. Simpson's long and wicked story short, this uncle Dr. Rant, somehow also a priest ("I can't imagine how he got to be one"), became by unknown means a wealthy man – ours is not to reason why. On his dying day Rant, a vile old snake if there ever was one, announced to his two remaining relatives that the dueling wills were concealed in different pockets of his vast library, not excluding some works he had already given away to public institutions and suchlike. Thus the only impediment to her inheritance, claims Mrs. Simpson, is her cousin John Eldred – and I think the ends of our circle are close enough for us to stop here.  

The only criticism one could ever level at this author – whose style is as impeccable as that of any other twentieth-century writer – is his occasional overreliance on provincial dialects, which for his musical ear seemed to have held a curious fascination. More often than not, the truth about the local circumstances is revealed by the rustic resident and some of the concomitant terror is lost in the decryption of the oddities (on rare occasions, as it were, the weirdness of the language actually heightens our fears). We are mercifully spared too many of these humble clarifications and glide smoothly at James's natural heights. Garrett comes off as a bit callow at times, but that fact aids him in his quest as no one rightly expects a young librarian to match wits with a decrepit and diabolical scholar, dead or alive. And if you think Garrett may be a coincidental passenger on that shorebound train, you may also think our ending is a tad too cheerful. And you also may not be quite as attentive as those old Westerners.

The Leonardo

What do small moments of cruelty bring the bully?  I can say without fear of perjury that I have never investigated an answer to that question since bullies are the nadir of the majority of privileged childhoods and adolescences (some childhoods, alas, are plagued by far worse events).  Every green goose in every classroom is examined by those miniature savages and deemed ripe for a certain kind of prolonged humiliation.   Do we gain from these episodes?   Maybe the tormented learn to defend themselves, to push back enough to dissuade, to become impervious to verbal assault – a talent that will serve them well as they age and realize that, with the proper amount of misclassification, everything anyone says can be interpreted as an attack.  Regardless of the age of the afflicter, cruelty is the worst act of this world because it is the absence of pity, and pity is what distinguishes us from all the brutish beasts of this realm.  An introduction to this short but poignant tale.

The time and place is mid- to late Weimar, and our protagonist will be a thin, innocuous-looking Polish émigré, but more on him in a moment.  Our two non-heroes – it may be going too far to call them villains, if you know how this all ends – are a pair of layabout brothers, Gustav and Anton.  They are, the narrator assures us, separate beings, yet they seem to combine into a single miscible oaf:

The elder one, Gustav, had a furniture-moving company; the younger one happened to be temporarily unemployed, but did not lose heart.  Gustav had an evenly ruddy complexion, bristling fair eyebrows, and an ample, cupboardlike torso always clothed in a pullover of coarse gray wool.  He wore elastic bands to hold his shirtsleeves at the joints of his fat arms, so as to keep his wrists free and prevent sloppiness. Anton's face was pockmarked, he trimmed his moustache in the shape of a dark trapezoid, and wore a dark red sweater over his spare wiry frame.  But when they both leaned their elbows on the balcony railings, their backsides were exactly the same, big and triumphant, with identically checkered cloth enclosing tightly their prominent buttocks. 

Simple household tasks could not be expected of such a duo, so that lot predictably falls to Anna, a "plump-armed buxom woman" with one of her front teeth knocked out.  A modern reader may well wonder why less is made of this missing fang, with the aim of fortifying his suspicion that the brothers may have been responsible for its loosening – but we need to move on.  The lives of the three are not quite hardscrabble, but these are tough times and any flash of affluence in their "sinister district" is immediately noted and envied.  And so, one fateful April morning, they espy from the aforementioned balcony perch "a little pushcart with a suitcase and a heap of books" entering their courtyard.  And ingressing that same space in vague control of these personal effects is the new lodger Romantovski.

Romantovski will be heard muttering in his native language towards the conclusion of our tale, yet little if anything is made of his foreignness in the sense of birthplace or accent.  The problem has much more to do with his slantindicular relationship to the wheezing and violent world of the two brothers, who one might imagine were destined in the next decade to champion a certain thuggish cause.  Romantovski bothers the siblings because, like most imbeciles, they feel threatened when others will not resort to their Neanderthal means of interaction.  Our newest lodger also distinctly seems to be operating in a different plane of human experience: 

Normally, one would not discern anything special in him at a casual glance, but the brothers did.  For example, he walked differently: at every step he rose on a buoyant toe in a peculiar manner, stepping and flying up as if the mere act of treading allowed him a chance to perceive something uncommon over the common heads.  He was what is termed a 'slank,' very lean, with a sharp-nosed face and appallingly restless eyes.  Out of the too short sleeves of his double-breasted jacket his long wrists protruded with a kind of annoying and nonsensical obviousness ('here we are; what should we do?').  He went out and came home at unpredictable hours.  On one of the first mornings Anton caught sight of him near a bookstand: he was pricing, or had actually bought something, because the vendor nimbly beat one volume against another and carried them to the nook behind the stand.  Additional eccentricities were noted: his light remained on practically until dawn; he was oddly unsociable.

One cannot really fault him for being unsociable when so few options present themselves (the options being beer-swilling and boorish).  But it is when Romantovski confesses to his late-night readings ("old, old tales," he insists) that his separation from the world of the brothers becomes dangerously clear.  To confirm this hateful habit, Anton pays the Pole a few unannounced late-night visits only to discover that both the light beneath the door crack and its master are still on ("Anton shook the door handle.  The golden thread snapped").  There is nothing more frightening to a chest-pounding bully than an intellectual because he will not respond in kind, and any response on his part will be appropriately condescending or at least thought of as such.  That is why after a few attempts to make him jollier, the brothers resort to "a series of trivial torments," beginning on a Monday, with their repertoire of nasty tricks "exhausted ... by Thursday."  That is, until they decide to involve Anna more deeply in their schemes.

The Leonardo has remained an old favorite of mine among Nabokov's works, perhaps because it is devoid of the bitter nostalgia that marks so many of his Berlin tales (importantly, no Russian characters seem to participate).  That said, I do at times appreciate a dose of bitter nostalgia, especially when directed at a person, not at an amorphous government or even more amorphous theory of the means of production.  We are not quite sure what Romantovski might enjoy; even an eleventh-hour revelation says more about his career path than his person.  But at one critical juncture in our story he senses the entrapment common to those who endure forced migration, and his despair clouds his survival instincts.  His weary mind runs and yet his wearier legs cannot run at all:    

Far away from him a bright twinkle promised safety; it meant a lighted street, and although what could be seen was probably one lone lamp, that slit in the blackness seemed a marvelous festive blaze, a blissful region of radiance, full of rescued men.

What he is running from, I cannot share.  It is extremely likely that he has always found the need to escape to another world which he can fashion to his liking.  But hardly, one would say, in his own image.

Simulacros

A short story ("Shams") by this Argentine, who died thirty years ago this month.  You can read the original here.

We are a strange lot.  In this country where things are done out of obligation or boastfulness, our family prefers unfettered activities, tasks just because they're tasks.  We shams are of no use for anything else.

We have one flaw: we lack originality.  Almost everything we decide to do is inspired – frankly speaking, copied – from celebrated models.  Any novelty we might contribute is actually inevitable: an anachronism, a surprise, a scandal.  My eldest uncle claims we are like carbon copies, identical to the original but of another color, another role, another purpose.  My third eldest sister likens herself to Andersen's nightingale, and her romanticism makes us nauseous.

There are many of us and we all live on Humboldt street.

We do things certainly, but relating them is difficult because we lack the most important element – the anxiety and expectation of doing things, the surprises more tantalizing than the results, the failures in which the whole family collapses on the floor like a house of cards and for days nothing can be heard other than guffaws and laments.  Relating all that we do is hardly a means of filling the inevitable holes because at times we are poor, or imprisoned, or ill, and at times one of us dies (it pains me to touch upon the matter), or one of us betrays, or resigns, or enters the Ministry of Taxation.  But from this it should not be deduced that we are melancholy or doing badly.  We live in the Pacífico neighborhood, and we do things every time we have the chance.  Many of us are brimming with ideas and eager to put them into practice.  The gallows, for example: until now no one has been able to agree on the origin of the idea.  My fifth sister says that it was one of my first cousins, who are all rather philosophical; but my eldest uncle insists that the idea occurred to him first, after he had read a cloak-and-dagger novel.  But in the end we care little either way.  The only thing that matters is doing things, and for that reason I tell these tales with little zeal, if only to distance myself from the rain this empty afternoon.

The garden is in front of the house, which is odd for Humboldt street.  It is no bigger than a patio, but with three steps higher than a sidewalk, which lends it the showy aspect of a platform, the ideal location for a scaffold.  As the railings are of masonry and iron, work can be done without having the passers-by, so to speak, in the house; they might lean up against the railings and stay there for hours but that doesn't bother us.  "We shall begin at the full moon," my father ordered.  During the day we would go look for wood and iron in the lumberyards on Juan Bautista Justo Avenue; yet my sisters remained in the living room practicing their wolf howls, after which my youngest aunt determined that scaffolds attract wolves and incite them to bay at the moon.  At my cousins' costs I acquired our provision of nails and tools; my eldest uncle sketched out the plans then argued over the variety and quality of the instruments of torture with my mother and my second uncle.  I recall the end of their discussion: they cruelly agreed on a rather elevated platform over which they mounted a scaffold and wheel with a bit of free space designed to inflict pain or decapitate according to how things stood.  My eldest uncle thought the whole contraption a much feebler version of his original concept, yet the dimensions of the garden in front and the cost of the materials always restricted our family's ambitions.       

We began construction one Sunday afternoon after ravioli.  Although we have never worried about what our neighbors think, it was clear that the few snoops we did have believed us to be mounting a couple of additions to the house.  The first one to be surprised was old Mr. Cresta from across the street, and he came over to ask why we were installing something akin to a platform.  My sisters retreated to a corner of the garden and emitted a few wolf howls.  A lot of people gathered but we kept working until nighttime, stopping only once we had finished the platform and the two gangways (for the priest and the condemned man, who must not go up together). 

On Monday some of our family members went to their respective jobs – since something has to die – and the rest of us began to raise the scaffold while my eldest uncle looked over some old plans for the wheel.  His idea involved placing the wheel as high as possible above a slightly irregular pole such as, for example, a burnished trunk of poplar.   To placate him, my second brother and my first cousins took the truck out to look for a poplar; meanwhile my eldest uncle and my mother fitted the spokes of the wheel into the hub and I prepared an iron hoop.  It was at times like these that we enjoyed ourselves immensely: everywhere you could hear hammering; my sisters were baying in the living room; the neighbors were gathering at the gates and exchanging their impressions about what was going on; and between the sulphur and mauve streaks of dusk ascended the profile of the scaffold with my youngest uncle sitting astride the crossbeam to fasten the hook and slipknot.

At this stage, the people in the street could not help but realize what we were doing, and a chorus of protests and threats pleasantly encouraged us to crown our day's work with the erection of the wheel.  A few hecklers had tried to impede my second brother and my cousins from entering the house with the magnificent poplar trunk from their truck.  A tug-of-war ensued; pulling in disciplined fashion our family gradually gained control of the trunk, placing it in the garden beside a baby only a few months old taken from its home.  My father personally returned the baby to its exasperated parents, handing it over politely through the railings.  And while attention was focused on these sentimental alternatives my eldest uncle, helped by my first cousins, placed the wheel on the end of the trunk and began to raise it.  The police arrived just as the whole family was gathered on the platform commenting favorably on the scaffold's great view.  Only my third sister remained near the door, and she ended up having to talk to the deputy commissioner in person.  It was not hard to convince him that we were working within the boundaries of our estate on a project that could only involve anti-constitutional power if used; the whisperings of the neighbors, we added, were but the product of hatred and the fruit of envy.  Nightfall saved us from further wastes of time.      

Under a carbide lamp we dined on the platform watched by a hundred-odd resentful neighbors.  Never did pickled suckling pig ever taste so exquisite, never did Nebbiolo seem so black and sweet.  A breeze from the north softly jostled the scaffold; once or twice the wheel squeaked as if the crows had already alighted to commence their feast.  Muttering vague threats the onlookers began to disperse; twenty or thirty remained glued to the gates apparently waiting for something to happen.  After we had coffee we turned off the lamp in favor of the moonlight rising over the balustrades of the terrace.  My sisters bayed and my cousins and uncles slowly walked around the platform making the foundations quake with their steps.  In the silence that followed the moon rose to the height of the slipknot and the wheel looked like it was lying in a silver-rimmed cloud.  At both the moon and the wheel we gazed, so happy that it became a pleasure, but still the neighbors were muttering at the gates as if disappointed.  They lit cigarettes and went to lie down, some of them in pyjamas and others more quietly.  The street remained, with the smoke of a watchman's cigarette in the distance and the 108 bus that passed every so often; and we had already gone to sleep dreaming of parties, elephants, and silken garb.