5

Amongst the Gahuka-Gana and Gururumba tribes in Papua New Guinea, young boys dressed as tigers are brought to the river, the air around them thick with the chanting and howling of the warriors. There they are confronted by a group of men standing knee-deep in the water; the men are masturbating, and pushing sharp leaf shards farther and farther up their nostrils until they begin to bleed profusely. The initiates imitate the men’s actions until they have induced their own hemorrhaging; they are then taken deep into the woods, where they spend a year living in the warriors’ huts. During this period they have almost no contact with women, and dedicate themselves to learning the arts of nosebleeds, vomiting, and playing the flute.

Augusto García Roxler’s first steps in the company of men were likewise systematic and shadowed. Certain university legends (pejorative rumors that perished during the voyage from the Department of Medicine to his current kingdom in Philosophy and Letters over on Puan Street) have him fondling his pudenda during written exams: not exactly a hero-on-horseback effigy of Argentine letters. I was able to discover (through covert operations I will not discuss until the time is ripe) that his contact with the fair sex had been held to a minimum. On the other hand, the impression he gave—timid, vulnerable—led several unattractive female members of the administrative staff to trust him enough to take part in his experiments. Emilia “Piggy” Sosa was the first subject to complete his strange set of questionnaires, and to bear stoically the horror that such original, mysterious versions of the Theory produced. Apparently, the flaws in his nude physique made the research easier to conduct; when combined with other factors, the effect was such that his subjects voluntarily, instinctively recognized him as a predator. He was also careful to take precise cranial measurements. By the time I entered the department, however, he had lost his way, and abandoned all of these practices.

Personally, I didn’t think much of his theories at the beginning. I smirked each time I heard or read his name, and if I happened to come across a text of his while rummaging through boxes of used books, I pushed it aside without a second thought, much as you’d separate out the uncoordinated children, or those who can’t write a proper sentence. Closing my eyes now, I can see him making his way down the Main Hall, his expression serious yet absentminded, a gray overcoat, papers and books falling out of his pockets, and I see myself languidly chewing bubble gum, or raising one condescending eyebrow, or doing both at once; the wild years of Augustus’s theories were history, and not the kind that leaves disciples, prefaces, and fear scattered in its wake.

The fact that he was still around was less an honor for us than proof of a doddering ecosystem wherein doddering academics were allowed to coexist peacefully amidst the institutional deterioration, much as they had all their lives; the only thing expected of them was the possibility of (doddering) emeritus-type appearances. Thanks to these individuals, the university had quite a collection of pictures of Dorian Gray—automaton portraits for an antiquated university that never quite managed to be proud of itself. Even before I entered the department, Augustus’s intellectual life had come to an end. The weakening of his higher faculties had given him a certain charm . . . but as for reading his books? No one but me, with my omnivorous appetite and devotion to the task of learning, would ever have bothered with those spurious texts.

As is well-known, it is difficult to separate sense from sensibilities as regards one’s contemporaries—and even more difficult if the contemporary in question looks like the cousin of some minor sub-species of Tyrannosaurus rex. The one thing I can state with certainty is that when I finally heard his voice for the first time, his phrasing had the cadence of absolute fact. And at that moment, the impossible occurred: the star pupil, the rampaging tigress of the classroom (moi) took an interest in the aged beast, the out-to-pasture professor, Augustus. And ensuite, everything changed: our inverted romance took a decisive turn as the brio of my youth combined with a gift for action that can only be acquired though training in the humanities, and I threw myself into an investigation of the possibilities that inhered in his theory.

García Roxler himself agreed to send me a copy of his seminal article from Rivista di Filosofia Continentale, which I later returned to its author accompanied by a brief tribute and a lengthy appendix. I then went straight to work, putting off research that was perhaps more urgent. I wrote in tiny, seraphic handwriting, filling loose pages that I carried around with me everywhere; I later translated those outbursts of thought into the docile calligraphy of the computer—so much more legible. I soon became an adherent of the illustrious theory that disdains linear representations of time, leaving past, present, and future all as yet unwritten. I tracked down seemingly untrackable articles published long ago in New Haven, Río Cuarto, Aix-en-Provence, Leipzig; I even managed to locate a handwritten copy of “Do Cave Paintings Dream of Syntactic Structures?” I also bought a fish, (Yorick, a red Betta splendens) because sooner or later I was going to need the company. I simply couldn’t stop.

The peaks of intensity, the moments in which my intuitions became more or less perceptible to the human eye, generally took place either early in the morning or after dinner; only from the hours of rose to the hours of violet (i.e. 4 to 7 p.m.) did my mind permit itself to rest. Outside of that interval, my constant clacking at the keyboard kept my fingernails worn to the nub. I used wrist braces to avoid carpal tunnel cramps. I read, argued aloud, scrawled premises, undid conclusions; I read Augustus’s books and class notes, returned to my own notes, crossed things out, corrected errors in the margins, and went back to writing again. Augustus had taken the first step in a tactically forbidden direction: his approach to Van Vliet’s Theory of Egoic Transmissions combined metaphysical intuition, anthropological depth, the real-world potential of political philosophy, and language that was seductive, daring, rationalist. I don’t believe I’d come across such a swarm of theoretical activity since my tumultuous affair with Clausewitz’s theories of war and Van Vliet’s own Maanloos Geschriften (Written on Moonless Nights). I simply couldn’t stop.