Gravity's Rainbow (68 page)

After the movie, Squalidozzi was introduced to Gerhardt von Göll, also known by his
nom de pègre
, “Der Springer.” Seems von Göll’s people and Waxwing’s were in the course of a traveling
business conference, rumbling the roads of the Zone in convoy, changing trucks and
busses so often there was no time for real sleep, only cat-naps—in the middle of the
night, the middle of a field, no telling when, you’d have to pile out, switch vehicles
and take off again along another road. No destinations, no fixed itinerary. Most of
the transportation was furnished through the expertise of veteran automotive jobber
Edouard Sanktwolke, who could hot-wire anything on wheels or caterpillar tracks—even
packed around a custom-built ebony case full of the rotor arms, each in its velvet
recess, to every known make, model, and year, in case the target’s owner had removed
that vital part.

Squalidozzi and von Göll hit it off right away. This film director turned marketeer
had decided to finance all his future movies out of his own exorbitant profits. “Only
way to be sure of having final cuts, ¿verdad? Tell me, Squalidozzi, are you too pure
for this? Or could your anarchist project use a little help?”

“It would depend what you wanted from us.”

“A film, of course. What would you like to do? How about
Martín Fierro?
”

Keep the customer happy. Martín Fierro is not just the gaucho hero of a great Argentine
epic poem. On the U-boat he is considered an anarchist saint. Hernández’s poem has
figured in Argentine political thinking for years now—everybody’s had his own interpretation,
quoting from it often as vehemently as politicians in 19th-century Italy used to from
I Promessi Sposi.
It goes back to the old basic polarity in Argentina: Buenos Aires vs. the provinces,
or, as Felipe sees it, central government vs. gaucho anarchism, of which he has become
the leading theoretician. He has one of these round-brim hats with balls hanging from
it, he has taken to lounging in the hatchways, waiting for Graciela—“Good evening,
my dove. Haven’t you got a kiss for the Gaucho Bakunin?”

“You look more like a Gaucho Marx,” Graciela drawls, and leaves Felipe to go back
to the treatment he’s working on for von Göll, using El Ñato’s copy of
Martín Fierro
, which has long been thumbed into separate loose pages, and smells of horses, each
of whose names El Ñato, tearfully
mamao
, can tell you. . . .

A shadowed plain at sundown. An enormous flatness. Camera angle is kept low. People
coming in, slowly, singly or in small groups, working their way across the plain,
in to a settlement at the edge of a little river. Horses, cattle, fires against the
growing darkness. Far away, at the horizon, a solitary figure on horseback appears,
and rides in, all the way in, as the credits come on. At some point we see the guitar
slung on his back: he is a payador, a wandering singer. At last he dismounts and goes
to sit with the people at the fire. After the meal and a round of caña he reaches
for his guitar and begins to strum his three lowest strings, the bordona, and sing:

Aquí me pongo a cantar

al compás de la vigüela,

que el hombre que lo desvela

una pena estrordinaria,

como la ave solitaria

con el cantar se consuela.

So, as the Gaucho sings, his story unfolds—a montage of his early life on the estancia.
Then the army comes and conscripts him. Takes him out to the frontier to kill Indians.
It is the period of General Roca’s campaign to open the pampas by exterminating the
people who live there: turning the villages into labor camps, bringing more of the
country under the control of Buenos Aires. Martín Fierro is soon sick of it. It’s
against everything he knows is right. He deserts. They send out a posse, and he talks
the sergeant in command over to his side. Together they flee across the frontier,
to live in the wilderness, to live with the Indians.

That’s Part I. Seven years later, Hernández wrote a
Return of Martín Fierro
, in which the Gaucho sells out: assimilates back into Christian society, gives up
his freedom for the kind of constitutional Gesellschaft being pushed in those days
by Buenos Aires. A very moral ending, but completely opposite to the first.

“What should I do?” von Göll seems to want to know. “Both parts, or just Part I?”

“Well,” begins Squalidozzi.

“I know what
you
want. But I might get better mileage out of two movies, if the first does well at
the box office. But will it?”

“Of course it will.”

“Something that anti-social?”

“But it’s everything we believe in,” Squalidozzi protests.

“But even the freest of Gauchos end up selling out, you know. That’s how things are.”

That’s how Gerhardt von Göll is, anyway. Graciela knows the man: there are lines of
liaison, sinister connections of blood and of wintering at Punta del Este, through
Anilinas Alemanas, the IG branch in Buenos Aires, on through Spottbilligfilm AG in
Berlin (another IG outlet) from whom von Göll used to get cut rates on most of his
film stock, especially on the peculiar and slow-moving “Emulsion J,” invented by Laszlo
Jamf, which somehow was able, even under ordinary daylight, to render the human skin
transparent to a depth of half a millimeter, revealing the face just beneath the surface.
This emulsion was used extensively in von Göll’s immortal
Alpdrücken
, and may even come to figure in
Martín Fierro.
The only part of the epic that really has von Göll fascinated is a singing-duel between
the white gaucho and the dark El Moreno. It seems like an interesting framing device.
With Emulsion J he could dig beneath the skin colors of the contestants, dissolve
back and forth between J and ordinary stock, like sliding in and out of focus, or
wipe—how he loved wipes! from one to the other in any number of clever ways. Since
discovering that Schwarzkommando are really in the Zone, leading real, paracinematic
lives that have nothing to do with him or the phony Schwarzkommando footage he shot
last winter in England for Operation Black Wing, Springer has been zooming around
in a controlled ecstasy of megalomania. He is convinced that his film has somehow
brought them into being. “It is my mission,” he announces to Squalidozzi, with the
profound humility that only a German movie director can summon, “to sow in the Zone
seeds of reality. The historical moment demands this, and I can only be its servant.
My images, somehow, have been chosen for incarnation. What I can do for the Schwarzkommando
I can do for your dream of pampas and sky. . . . I can take down your fences and your
labyrinth walls, I can lead you back to the Garden you hardly remember. . . .”

His madness clearly infected Squalidozzi, who then eventually returned to the U-boat
and infected the others. It seemed what they had been waiting for. “Africans!” daydreamed
the usually all-business Beláustegui at a staff meeting. “What if it’s true? What
if we’ve really come back, back to the way it was before the continents drifted apart?”

“Back to Gondwanaland,” whispered Felipe. “When Río de la Plata was just opposite
South-West Africa . . . and the mesozoic refugees took the ferry not to Montevideo,
but to Lüderitzbucht. . . .”

The plan is to get somehow to the Lüneburg Heath and set up a small estancia. Von
Göll is to meet them there. By the gun-mounts tonight, Graciela Imago Portales dreams.
Is von Göll a compromise they can tolerate? There are worse foundations than a film.
Did Prince Potemkin’s fake villages survive Catherine’s royal progress? Will the soul
of the Gaucho survive the mechanics of putting him into light and sound? Or will someone
ultimately come by, von Göll or another, to make a Part II, and dismantle the dream?

Above and beyond her the Zodiac glides, a north-hemisphere array she never saw in
Argentina, smooth as an hour-hand. . . . Suddenly there’s a long smash of static out
of the P.A., and Beláustegui is screaming, “Der Aal! Der Aal!” The eel, wonders Graciela,
the
eel?
Oh, yes, the torpedo. Ah, Beláustegui is as bad as El Ñato, he feels his own weird
obligation to carry on in German submariner slang, it is just precisamente a seagoing
Tower of Babel here—the
torpedo?
why is he screaming about the torpedo?

For the good reason that the U-boat has just appeared on the radar screen of the U.S.S.
John E. Badass
(smile, U-boat!), as a “skunk” or unidentified pip, and the
Badass
, in muscular postwar reflex, is now lunging in at flank speed. Reception tonight
is perfect, the green return “fine-grained as a baby’s skin,” confirms Spyros (“Spider”)
Telangiecstasis, Radarman 2nd Class. You can see clear out to the Azores. It is a
mild, fluorescent summer evening on the sea. But what’s this on the screen now, moving
fast, sweep by sweep, broken as a drop of light from the original pip, tiny but unmistakable,
in toward the unmoving center of the sweep, closer now—

“Bakerbakerbaker!” hollers somebody down in Sonar, loud and scared, over the phones.
It means hostile torpedo on the way. Coffee messes go crashing, parallel rulers and
dividers sliding across the glass top of the dead-reckoning tracer as the old tin
can goes heeling over around onto an evasion pattern that was already obsolete during
the Coolidge administration.

Der Aal’s pale tunnel of wake is set to intersect the
Badass’s
desperate sea-squirm about midships. What intervenes is the drug Oneirine, as the
hydrochloride. The machine from which it has emerged is the coffee urn in the mess
hall of the
John E. Badass.
Playful Seaman Bodine—none other—has seeded tonight’s grounds with a massive dose
of Laszlo Jamf’s celebrated intoxicant, scored on Bodine’s most recent trip to Berlin.

The property of time-modulation peculiar to Oneirine was one of the first to be discovered
by investigators. “It is experienced,” writes Shetzline in his classic study, “in
a subjective sense . . . uh . . . well. Put it this way. It’s like stuffing wedges
of silver sponge,
right, into
, your
brain!
” So, out in the mellow sea-return tonight, the two fatal courses do intersect in
space, but not in time. Not nearly in time, heh heh. What Beláustegui fired his torpedo
at was a darkrust old derelict, carried passively by currents and wind, but bringing
to the night something of the skull: an announcement of metal emptiness, of shadow,
that has spooked even stronger positivists than Beláustegui. And what passed into
visual recognition from the small speeding pip on the
Badass
’s radar screen proved to be a corpse, dark in color, perhaps a North African, which
the crew on the destroyer’s aft 3-inch gun mount spent half an hour blowing to pieces
as the gray warship slid by at a safe distance, fearful of plague.

Now what sea is this you have crossed, exactly, and what sea is it you have plunged
more than once to the bottom of, alerted, full of adrenalin, but caught really, buffaloed
under the epistemologies of these threats that paranoid you so down and out, caught
in this steel pot, softening to devitaminized mush inside the soup-stock of your own
words, your waste submarine breath? It took the Dreyfus Affair to get the Zionists
out and doing, finally: what will drive you out of your soup-kettle? Has it already
happened? Was it tonight’s attack and deliverance? Will you go to the Heath, and begin
your settlement, and wait there for your Director to come?

• • • • • • •

Under a tall willow tree beside a canal, in a jeep, in the shade, sit Tchitcherine
and his driver Džabajev a teenage Kazakh dope fiend with pimples and a permanently
surly look, who combs his hair like the American crooner Frank Sinatra, and who is,
at the moment, frowning at a slice of hashish and telling Tchitcherine, “Well, you
should have taken more than this, you know.”

“I only took what his freedom is worth to him,” explains Tchitcherine. “Where’s that
pipe, now?”

“How do
you
know what his freedom is worth to him? You know what I think? I think you’re going
a little Zone-happy out here.” This Džabajev is more of a sidekick, really, than a
driver, so he enjoys immunity, up to a point, in questioning Tchitcherine’s wisdom.

“Look, peasant, you read the transcript in there. That man is one unhappy loner. He’s
got problems. He’s more useful running around the Zone thinking he’s free, but he’d
be better off locked up somewhere. He doesn’t even know what his freedom
is
, much less what it’s worth. So
I
get to fix the price, which doesn’t matter to begin with.”

“Pretty authoritarian,” sneers young Džabajev. “Where’s the matches?”

It’s sad, though. Tchitcherine likes Slothrop. He feels that, in any normal period
of history, they could easily be friends. People who dress up in bizarre costumes
have a savoir-vivre—not to mention the sort of personality disorder—that he admires.
When he was a little boy, back in Leningrad, Tchitcherine’s mother sewed by hand a
costume for him to wear in a school entertainment. Tchitcherine was the wolf. The
minute he put on the head, in front of the mirror by the ikon, he knew himself. He
was the wolf.

The Sodium Amytal session nags at the linings of Tchitcherine’s brain as if the hangover
were his own. Deep, deep—further than politics, than sex or infantile terrors . . .
a plunge into the nuclear blackness. . . . Black runs all through the transcript:
the recurring color black. Slothrop never mentioned Enzian by name, nor the Schwarzkommando.
But he did talk about the Schwarzgerät. And he also coupled “schwarz-” with some strange
nouns, in the German fragments that came through. Blackwoman, Blackrocket, Blackdream. . . .
The new coinages seem to be made unconsciously. Is there a single root, deeper than
anyone has probed, from which Slothrop’s Blackwords only appear to flower separately?
Or has he by way of the language caught the German mania for name-giving, dividing
the Creation finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from
named, even to bringing in the mathematics of combination, tacking together established
nouns to get new ones, the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules
are words. . . .