‘Come over here, young De Vere.’ That’s how I was sometimes addressed both by Muriel and his followers, although the latter did so merely by imitation or perhaps impregnation. Professor Rico always treated me kindly and benevolently because of my closeness to Muriel, but also somewhat dismissively because of my youth, he was, after all, fifteen years older than me and I was more or less the same age as his students, whom he took great pleasure in humorously despising, humiliating and terrorizing, although his victims seemed not to notice, thus demonstrating, according to him, their sad lack of little grey cells or nous (he loved to mix high-flown language with slang or sometimes even genuinely crude expressions, just so that we wouldn’t think he lived entirely in the limbo of centuries past). It was the same, indeed, with his teaching assistants, with most of his colleagues or supposed peers and almost every other being under the sun; generally speaking, any contemporary of his merited little respect and was, by definition, deemed to be defective. I imagine that he himself regretted being his own contemporary as well as that of all the many ignoramuses and idiots who criss-crossed the world, happily bellowing forth their blatant idiocy, as he once put it. I still see him from time to time, and, as is only natural, his distaste has only increased with the passing decades. ‘Sit down for a moment, young De Vere, I need to question you. And bring your friend too, or were you hoping to smuggle her past me? Introduce us.’ She was called or called herself Bettina and worked nights in a bar, which is where I had met her; she was a cheerful, quick-witted girl and wore short skirts, well, not so very short, but they did prove pretty spectacular when she sat down, a fact doubtless anticipated by the Professor as soon as his swift eye saw her standing there. ‘De Vere, now what kind of a surname is that?’ And he pulled a sceptical face. ‘It’s not hard to pronounce nor does it look particularly odd when written down, but it is very un-Spanish, if it is Spanish at all. No, no, it’s French in origin.’ And he said my name with a French accent and repeated it, stressing the guttural ‘r’. ‘But the most famous De Veres are to be found in England, as far as I know, and I do, of course, know all there is to know, where the name is pronounced De Viah, De Viah.’ He liked the sound of his own voice, and he pronounced my name this time very affectedly and with a more or less English accent; he was admirable really, he never had the slightest fear of making a fool of himself, indeed, he never did, however close to the edge he trod; he didn’t care who he was talking to or who was listening, whether addressing a congregation of international luminaries or a young woman he didn’t even know, he always felt he was the dominant, superior party (except when he was with Muriel). ‘It’s the family name of the earls of Oxford, and dates back to the reign of William the Conqueror — in the eleventh century, just in case you didn’t know, nowadays, one can never assume that people know even the most basic of facts.’ I did know, as it happened, having studied English history at university, but I wasn’t going to interrupt him. ‘Not so long ago, I had a student who was convinced that the French Revolution was a rebellion against Napoleon. I mean, for fuck’s sake, ça suffit,’ he added in French. Sometimes, by way of a preamble or conclusion, Rico would utter strange, unintelligible onomatopoeia (if one can call them that) of his own invention, perhaps as a way of avoiding the usual filler words like ‘Well’, ‘So’ and ‘Anyway’, which he must have thought vulgar. ‘Svástire,’ he said, or I think he did, then went on: ‘The oldest recorded De Vere, I seem to recall — and if I seem to recall it, it must be true — was named Aubrey, which is neither more nor less than a distorted version of Albericus (how’s that for a bit of unexpected Latin), a Christian name that has recurred several times throughout the family history. There has also been a Robert, a Francis, a Horace and a few Johns, which means that you share the same name as — or have copied it from — a couple of far nobler subjects from an earlier age.’ He was speaking to me, but was sitting half-turned towards Bettina and kept shooting sideways glances at her thighs or perhaps higher up than that; she had not crossed her legs, and so her brief, tight skirt allowed one to discern something in between them; the crotch of her knickers, I suppose, although she, like so many of her contemporaries, did not always wear knickers: it was all part and parcel of that liberated age and of a consequent desire to provoke. She noticed these myopic glances and allowed herself to be looked at; she appeared to be listening to Rico with close attention, although it could equally well have been amazement. ‘More than that, I have an Anglo-Saxon colleague who is just beginning to maintain, secretly until he has published his study (it won’t be worth a button, but that’s his lookout), that the corpus of texts we believe to have been written by William Shakespeare’ — that’s what he said, ‘corpus of texts’ — ‘was in fact written by a De Vere.’ Pleased with his phonetic skills, he again pronounced this as ‘De Viah’, with great delight and exaggeration, it sounded almost like an insult or as if he were retching. ‘Edward, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Lord Great Chamberlain, ambassador, a wild, quarrelsome individual, not without talent: soldier, duellist, poet, failed plotter against Sidney and the person responsible for introducing into Elizabeth I’s court the perfumed, embroidered glove. You probably haven’t a clue who Sidney was, but never mind, now you do,’ and he paused for a second. This was entirely untrue, because how could we know who Sidney was from the mere mention of his name? I was also confused by that mention of a glove, but perhaps he hadn’t just slipped it in by chance, maybe it was a way of drawing us in.
‘Perfumed gloves? I’ve never heard of those before,’ commented Bettina, who probably wasn’t much interested, but whom the Professor appeared to have entranced with his torrent of useless knowledge (useless to most of humanity, but not to him). ‘How do they make sure they stay perfumed?’
‘You mean how did they, because no one wastes their time nowadays on such folderols. I’ll explain later, rica,’ replied the Professor. I was taken aback to hear him address her as rica — or sweetheart — given that his name was Rico, unless it was intended as a prophetic appellation, as if he were summoning her to a subsequent secret meeting. He was in his stride now and wanted to tell us everything he knew about that particular De Vere. He again turned to me, although still looking at Bettina out of the corner of his eye. ‘As you know, there are numerous theories about the non-existence of Shakespeare, each one stranger than the last; to be honest, it’s developing into a real industry. Or, I should say, theories about whether his name was used as a pseudonym or perhaps as a front for that incomparable literary treasure for which some cretinous critics can see no human explanation, which is understandable really when measured by the standard of their own sterility. Some say that Marlowe wasn’t stabbed in a tavern brawl when he was twenty-nine, but staged and faked his own death in order to escape his enemies and then continue writing as Shakespeare; some claim that the real author of the plays was Bacon, while others say it was Heywood or Fletcher, or several of them all together; others opt for Kyd or Middleton, others Webster or Beaumont or even Rowley, Chettle, Lord Brooke, even Florio or Fludd, all utterly absurd, ridiculous.’ I had heard a couple of those names in my lectures, but most were new to me. I was impressed by his knowledge, he was like a walking biographical dictionary, although it also occurred to me that they might be invented names, because, in the face of ignorance, one is always free to invent. ‘Frushta,’ he said, using one of his original onomatopoeia to fill the brief pause. ‘And now there’s this arrogant sod who thinks he can prove that Shakespeare was a front for Edward de Vere; he vouchsafed this information to me at a conference — in utmost confidence, of course — urging me to keep his secret safe. For several years! Can you imagine? I had no qualms, however, about spilling the beans, hoping either that someone would refute his theory before he finally gave birth to his Big Book or that someone would get in first and ruin his discovery, my colleagues have no scruples whatsoever and are constantly stealing other people’s ideas and, besides, I don’t like the fellow.’ (‘OK, we get the picture,’ I thought, scandalized.) ‘He dared to challenge something I had written about Lazarillo de Tormes. True, there weren’t many people present, but still he had the nerve to challenge me. An Anglo-Saxon challenging me on Lazarillo,’ he said again. ‘They’ll invite any ragamuffin to these symposia nowadays and allow them to hold forth on whatever they bloody well like. Yes, any rapscallion is welcome.’