V2nd - chapter 11 - more examples (fatherly interjections)

[Michael Bailey]

because I do not want
because I do not want to  find myself thinking like Stencil,
cold-heartedly pursuing traces of V.
or reading Chapter 11 strictly as a memoir....

I've tried to find each instance in which Fausto's text explicitly
reaches out to Paola.
Without analysis, except to say they do add emphasis to the tale:

334 - "Fausto himself may be defined in only 3 ways.  As a
relationship: your father."

334 - "before I had married your poor mother"

335 - "Maijstral the Second arrived with you, child, and with the war."

336 - "You must now be subjected, dear Paola, to a barrage of
undergraduate sentiment."

337 - "His voice once guided the shipwrecked St. Paul to bless our
Malta." (ok, not specifically to Paola, but is she named after him?
Is Paola clambering out of the wreckage of Malta and/or her marriage
to Pappy Hod to convert the Whole Sick Crew to a New Gospel?)

340 - "You, child, what sort of monster are you?"

340 - "What of our own?  She sleeps."  (although this could be in any
generic memoir, if Fausto were my father I'd feel a frisson at the
mention of my infant self, but haven't noted the maybe 10 more times
he mentions her in the narrative without addressing her)

346 - "These, poor child, are the sad events surrounding your given
name.  It is a different name now that you've been carried off by the
U.S. Navy.  But beneath that accident you are still Maijstral-Xemxi -
a terrible misalliance.  May you survive it.  I fear not so much a
reappearance in you of Elena's mythical "disease" as a fracturing of
personality such as your father has undergone.  May you be only Paola,
one girl: a single given heart, a whole mind at peace.
"Later, after the marriage, after your birth, well into the reign of
Fausto II when the bombs were falling, the relationship with Elena
must have come under some kind of moratorium...."


348 - "Is it a world anyone could have brought a child into?"
349 - "None of us has the right to ask that anymore, Paola.  Only you."

350 - "Now there is your grandmother, child, who also comes into this
briefly.  Carla Maijstral she died as you know last March, outliving
my father by three years."

351 - [paraphrasing the lead-in to his addressing her: misery loves
company...] "Their compulsion to gather together, their pathological
fear of loneliness extends on past the threshold of sleep; so that
when they turn the corner, as we all must, as we all have done and do
- some more often than others - to find ourselves on the street...You
know the street I mean, child.  The street of the Twentieth Century,
at whose far end or turning - we hope - is some sense of home or
safety. But no guarantees...."

358 - "It was not hostility, Paola, this leaving you and Elena alone
during the raids."

[ sidebar: the Colonel Bogie march was known much better to those of
my generation, growing up in the 60s on Turtle Island with background
and incidental music supplied by the Tube, as "Winners warm up with
Malt-O-Meal" ]

366 - "The child - you - grew healthier, more active.  By '42 you had
fallen in with a roistering crew of children whose chief amusement was
a game called R.A.F.  Between raids a dozen or so of you would go out
in the streets, spread your arms like aeroplanes and run screaming and
buzzing in and out of the ruined walls, rubble heaps and holes of the
city.  The stronger and taller boys were, of course, Spitfires.
Others - unpopular boys, girls, and younger children - went to make up
the planes of the enemy.  You were usually, I believe, an Italian
dirigible.  The most buoyant balloon-girl in the stretch of sewer we
occupied that season.  Harassed, chased, dodging the rocks and sticks
tossed your way, you managed each time with the "Italian" agility your
role demanded, to escape subjugation.  But always, having outwitted
your opponenets, you would finally do your patriotic duty by
surrendering.  And only when you were ready.
"Your mother and Fausto were away from you most of the time: nurse and
sapper.  You were left to the two extremes of our underground society:
the old, for whom the distinction between sudden and gradual
affliction hardly existed, and the young - your true own - who
unconsciously were creating a discrete world, a prototype of the world
Fausto III, already outdated, would inherit.  Did the two forces
neutralize and leave you on the lonely promontory between two worlds?
Can you still look both ways, child?  If so you stand at an enviable
vantage: you're still that four-year-old belligerent with history in
defilade."

367 - "For all their dirt, noise and roughnecking the kids of Malta
served a poetic function.  The R.A.F. game was only one metaphor they
devised to veil the world that was....Paola: my child, Elena's child
but most of all Malta's, you were one of them.  These children knew
what was happening: knew that bombs killed.  But what's a human, after
all?"

379 - "I would never be telling you this had you been brought up under
any illusion you were "wanted."  But having been abandoned so early to
a common underworld, questions of want or possession never occured to
you.  So at least I assume; not, I hope, falsely."

382 - "I have been over it, Paola, and over it.  I have since attacked
myself more scathingly than any of your doubts could.  You will say I
had forgotten my understanding with God in administering a sacrament
only a priest can give.  That after losing Elena I'd "regressed" to
the priesthood I would have joined had I not married her."

383 - "May He be closer to you."


So, let's optimistically suggest Fausto may be eking out a living with
his writing, and because of his sense of inadequacy has allowed
himself to gradually become not super involved with Paola's life
hitherto - that is, not in a position or inclined to either squelch or
foster her spreading her wings.  Or even notice it all that much,
until like that moment when he's walking with Elena: "we've lost our
children!"

Perhaps he's been reading the pre-Socratics or writing a 3 volume
history of the Knights of Malta.  Anyway, that's how I see him, as a
bookish kind of guy.  The most passionate he gets about anything in a
positive sense in the whole testament, is about poetry (360): yada
yada, as a young man I was thinkin' bout (Alicia Keyes...) - er,
thinkin' 'bout bein' a priest, yada yada, then I got married and had a
kid, then there was the darn war....

...oh but hey, doggone, I'm a poet, all this warfare and retreat into
rockhood was a terrible darn distraction from that!  "[we poets] are
alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply
are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious
metaphor....if every poet were to vanish tomorrow, society would live
no longer than the quick memories and dead books of their poetry."

 And he looks up from his books and sees his child gone and has the
impulse to grant her a benison...a "Word of the Father" if you
will...a message in a bottle...

("it's only words, and words are all he has, to take her heart away...")



-- 
"Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respects a
violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural
liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the
whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all
governments, of the most free as well as of the most despotical." -
Adam Smith