Edouardo

     There were two great advantages to my job as a textbook editor. Though we kept some strict deadlines, I was always able to complete my work in a small fraction of the expected time, allowing me a good many hours to employ as I wished. It was there that I first read Beowulf in Old English, there that I translated Leonidas of Tarentum, there that I idled away a good many hours reading the Berkeley Barb and the L. A. Free Press, to both of which the corporate library subscribed, thanks to its director, a gay astrologer.
     That librarian was an example of what I found the other significant advantage of the workplace, which allowed me, despite my restlessness with conformity and big business, to linger there long enough to accumulate a nest egg for traveling. The fact is that, although it looked very much like an ordinary office, an insurance company for example, it was not quite the same. My own semi-alienated presence was not unique. Because the industry was publishing there were a number of literary types, artists, and other individualists lurking in the institutional halls who made the place considerably more bearable to each other.
     The company had its own one-man art department where in-house publications, catalogues, and advertisements were put together. The art director, liberated I presume because of that title, had an office in the executive wing despite his gnomish whimsy, drooping moustaches, and unlikely clothing. His home was a pleasure palace with layers of classy antique oriental rugs underfoot and dozens of varieties of small bright tropical fish darting about several salt-water tanks. He was generally inaccessible because he would wear earphones for music and could not hear his telephone or doorbell. Another of my colleagues had just decamped from Lama Commune after the community had defeated his proposal that all residents should be mandated to enact daily psychodramas based on their dreams. There was as well a latter-day Mark Twain, a Keokuk boy who liked to write and tell stories, playing up his country exoticism, and an independent Celtic scholar who later formed a commune with one of my co-workers, a poet who was later to walk the streets of Berkeley with sandwich boards of glad poetry. We made fraternal contacts as well among the few youthful pot-smokers in low level positions.
     But it seemed as though even the straight people often displayed a high weirdness quotient. Another editor on my own project was always poring over catalogues of spying merchandise. (He was one of the few who would not accept an anti-war armband Patricia had made to distribute for a Moratorium day.) We mythologized some who caught our attention. There was a tall blond man given the sobriquet “the farmer’s lout,” with what I have to admit was very little justification, while the officious little fellow who worked downstairs in supply was the “malicious dwarf,” after Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop.
     In those days I worked also with Edouardo. He was a generation older and one of his eyes looked off in an irrelevant direction, which lent him an aspect at first slightly distracting, but which I came to view as an appropriate analogue for his antic temperament. He was always impeccably and rather formally dressed, a form of semantic magic that served him well. It was, I think, his clothes and his semi-British accent that had got him his editorial job.
     Edouardo told us that he had grown up in Argentina, though his parents had come from Lebanon. (It is, as the reader will shortly realize, very difficult to discern whether any of the available facts about Edouardo in fact represent reality.) According to him, he had been sent to a British “public” boarding school where, during his teenage years, he was expelled for some combination of insubordination and moral turpitude. This much was not difficult to believe.
     Undeterred, upon his return to Buenos Aires, he purchased an Oxford tie and somehow parlayed this prop into membership in the club of Oxbridge graduates in the Argentine, an organization with many influential members. He was always rather vague about his professional activities during this stage of his life, preferring to focus on the café society in “the Paris of South America” and the endless hours he once spent discussing art, books, and politics while lingering over a few drinks and perhaps plotting a love affair or two.
     By his account he had known some seriously engaged left-wingers (and he was Jewish besides, enough to draw suspicion under the fascist military regime) and found himself jailed without charge. When he was just as suddenly released after six months, he decided to emigrate. Doubtless on the basis of his sharp appearance, he got a job selling neckties at Marshall Fields, but lost the spot after a few weeks when he advised a customer whom he felt had insulted him that a certain tie would match the man’s “bilious” complexion.
     At this professional crisis Edouardo decided to employ his chief skill, his art form, in fact, his recreation and delight: fabulation. He managed to score an interview with the publisher and proceeded to dazzle all he met with his polished language and conservative suits. He may have been exaggerating his persuasive skills, but he told us, his car pool comrades, that he had claimed to have earned a master’s degree in literature from the University of Beirut which at that moment was unfortunately aflame in civil war, making inquiries impossible. His undergraduate degree was from Heidelberg, but the names of Jewish graduates, he mentioned, had unfortunately been purged under the Nazis. Everyone wanted to believe him. He did, after all, sound so convincing with that accent. (On our drives to and from work, we heard the BBC accent deployed in scurrilous schoolboy songs, some with obscene Latin jokes. He was the first person I heard who used “fuck-all” to mean nothing.)
     Not only was he popular at work, he gained a reputation as a universal genius. In those days before the internet, if our library could not provide a bit of information necessary to write a footnote, one would have to travel to a bigger university or research library. Editors soon found that, if they asked Edouardo, he provided an immediate answer in every case. The subject did not matter – it could be a phrase in medieval Persian or a detail from the periodic chart, Edouardo seemed always to know every answer. I asked him if he were not apprehensive that, at some point, the books would be published and teachers who knew the real answers would write critical letters, but that eventuality seemed so remote to him it was as though it did not exist. Doubtless he was rightfully secure in his powers of bluff.
     Edouardo’s flights of fancy were not restricted to his professional life. We understood that despite his marriage, he pursued numerous liaisons, sometimes even leaving work for a rendezvous at a lunchless lunchtime. He was utterly charming to everyone, but particularly to women. I have no idea what he told the women he met; my only hint came once when I overheard him at a party explaining the challenges of his psychiatric practice to a lady he had been eying.
     I do not doubt that he was a recurrent trial to his wife. I even expressed reservations about his behavior to a common friend. When he heard of my comment, he was unperturbed. “That’s just what you should think. You are twenty-three. When you are fifty-three, your attitude will be different.” It is a simple fact that, to my callow perspective, he was a kind of mentor, not as a lover, but as a consciousness effervescing with brio, a character all the more intriguing for his errant eye and bald head, one who, whatever his faults, loved life and sought to live to the fullest, even when his field of operations was centered in a publishing company in the suburban Midwest.