“Nobody, nobody, nobody,” Becky said. She dropped the duster and waited for you to notice and retrieve it. “Nobody knows how deep this is. If they should have to admit it is so deep as it is, they would die of fear. Oh, yes, it’s scary. So scary it is to be seen on the street.”
You picked up the duster.
“Swear to me that you will never let me go out.” She rushed into your arms as you held the duster to her. Very softly she said, “Your father wants I should go out on the street dressed as a prostitute. He would throw me out dressed like a whore. He would sell me on the corners. Jake, Jake, swear to me you won’t let him do it.”
Gershon laughed. “Jake is invisible now. You can’t see him.”
Becky looked at him and smiled. “Welcome, sir, you are welcome. The pinochle players are upstairs. Please come in. A dollar is a dollar. Schlemiel!”
“He’s invisible!” Gershon raised an imaginary glass in toast. “They can’t hate him now. They can’t bother him. He has gone out from Egypt, you crazy old woman!”
“Sir,” said Becky, trembling as she hugged your shoulders, “sir, be gentle with me and I won’t mind. Look, I can do many things. My father was a shohet who killed chickens whispering a prayer as he cut their throats. Under my pillow I have a butcher’s knife hidden. Better I should warn you. But don’t worry. It’s a chalef, it is blessed and approved. With me you are safe. And don’t you think it is very exciting to sleep with a woman who has a ritual knife under her pillow?”
Gershon dropped on the couch. “You don’t believe anything. Never have you believed anything. You have done that just to bother me. You want to make our life together hard.”
“If they shouldn’t see him, how can they hate him?” whispered Becky. You pushed her away and saw on her face a look that would never recognize you again. Gershon, fallen on the couch, whispered, “Yes, invisible, invisible,” For the last time you stared at her transparent face where the eyes blinked off the seconds and the nervous, coated tongue came out and wet the lips you did not dare kiss. Gershon laughed in a low voice:
“And we, what right have we to be alive yet?”
* * *
Δ Hold fast to your decade of the thirties, Dragoness, the decade of your youth, and lie to yourself by saying that the seed of everything since lay then in John Garfield, the first existential hero. Perhaps it did, but that is hindsight and the fact is that at the time you got a much bigger charge from Paul Muni breaking rocks in I Am a Fugitive. And you know it. But the real weakness was that you and Javier and all your crowd of the thirties wanted your opium trip to be clean and safe and standard. That was where you slipped up, for you should have wanted risk, confusion, a crazy mixture of things. Leave standard dreams, that is, orthodoxy, to those who play it safe and make others play it safe: for how long are those who free us going to go on feeling themselves free once they seize power by the horns? That’s precisely when orthodoxy sets in, and then we have to come up with a fresh heresy or the dance is over. I tell you, Dragoness, every dogma must continuously generate its corresponding heresy or the illusion of freedom, which is perhaps as close as we can come to genuine freedom, can’t be maintained. And here as in all things political the man of wisdom is old Machiavelli, who seems cynical because he refuses to tell us fairy tales but is never foolish. Let us go on plowing the sea, as our grandfather Bolivar directed before becoming a statue, for we know that if the Banana Republicans are not allowed to moralize, they feel themselves oppressed, or, worse, are left with nothing at all to do with themselves. Machiavelli laid it on the line: politics is not concerned in the least with ethics, not because ethics should be scorned but simply because if one mixes politics and morality the nature of each is removed and the result is thorough confusion. And each time our munificent governors toss us a bouquet of flowers, let’s remember Mack the Veil (and the shark always has shiny teeth though the moon may be beaming over Soho) and keep clearly in mind that politics is the human struggle for relative power, not for a final idealistic Utopia, and that to govern means to keep your subjects well subjected so that they won’t attempt to grab your power. The old Florentine knew all the answers: men scorn what they possess, praise what has established itself, condemn the present, long for what is yet to come. Are they contented? Show me just one. No, but the point is that although discontented, they are passive and unless someone stirs them up they are entirely uninterested in power. It seems to me that just as your Yankee janizaries never examine Jefferson, so those on the other side ignore Marx, and my temporary Montezuma pays no attention to the constituents of the Seventeen; and when Louis the Fourteenth lifts his arms and moans, “Je vous ai compris,” he is referring to friendly Mack and not to Montesquieu, who is hoarding his sous in a stocking. Machiavelli whispers, Dragoness, that those who are ruled ask only for security, peace, and quiet, the chance to take care of their little private affairs, and the trick is not to irritate them while continuing to serve them up glorious speeches, refrigerators on the time-payment plan, vacations with pay. That done, they won’t even dream of barricades and guillotines. Mack the Veil is too often abused. Do you think he was describing abstract power, cold and isolated? I tell you, he knew what he was talking about, and before the rule of the fox, be he a fox of many or of one, there is always plenty of dialectic, as my Cuban cousins who happen to be at bat now would put it: for virtue leads to peace, peace to idleness, idleness to rebellion, rebellion to destruction, destruction to order, and order to virtue, and here we go again in the hall of many mirrors. What Mackie suggests is simply that we understand what makes the merry-go-round go around, so that we can take advantage of our chances when they present themselves. The ruler need not be either cruel or benevolent, humane or tyrannous, or anything at all except what the times advise. And on the other side of the fence, in the pasture of the sheep, every one of us must be aware of the real nature of the situation, not lost in foggy dreams; we will be free only when we can tell the yolk of the egg from the white and comprehend that mosquitoes buzz around the heads of the mighty too. Only if we stay on our toes can we achieve true freedom and make our revolution permanent no matter what may happen, or who the mammoth that may come along. But you, my Shirley Temples, all you Leftists of the thirties, waited for the apocalypse to arrive by a kind of lawful natural succession, while the fact is that the exercise of power subjects nature and almost negates it. The natural is revolution, which is why revolution cannot be withstood long. Established power is an old fox indeed, crafty at hiding and disguising the face of truth. Revolution strips men down to the soul and strips away those who resist the violence of truth. Permanent revolution is permanent heterodoxy, not a moment of illumination doomed to be isolated and condemned between two Establishments. Permanent revolution is the daily conquest of the outer limits of truth, creativity, the disorder that must always oppose the orthodox. Shake them up, Feodor Mihailovitch and Lev Davidovitch, for at this moment we have less time left than the shadows of jackals as dawn rises, and we still fail to take on color and solidity, they still hold the mirror before our noses and nothing is reflected. My kingdom for a necklace of garlic. Is that how it goes?
* * *
Δ “Maybe you want something else, Lizzie? Another drink? Maybe a vanilla soda?”
“No, Daddy. No thanks.”
You got up and walked out of the smell of smoke and grease and chocolate and coffee and a red-headed sailor passed looking in all directions, freckled, his canvas ditty bag in his hands, obviously lost, and an old man with a faded felt hat that came down over his ears was led along by a young woman who looked like him, the same damp eyes and high cheekbones, the same pointed trembling nose. She stopped and tried to straighten the black band of his hat and they walked toward the train platforms.