Jacob the Mutant Read online

  Beatitudes

  Joseph Roth indicates that at the time when Rose Plinianson emerged from the waters, the dance schools were a space that took on a greater number of students by the day. In the original text it says that people of the most diverse qualities turned up to that town, with great excitement, in hopes that their lives could occur with a sense of rhythm. They had erected both the typical salons used for rehearsing celebratory parties and a series of grandiose academies where they even taught the steps to tropical music. The competition was so abundant that, with growing frequency, new dances emerged with techniques even more difficult than the last ones. It was oftentimes the norm to resort to such advanced bodily skills that the performances carried with them an air of finding yourself in the rings of a circus instead of a dance studio. After reading these lines, some might find it logical that the publication of a text with these characteristics in the form of a book became impossible. Which is the motive why Joseph Roth reserved this story for his moments of inebriation. According to some scholars, the writing of The Border had more to do with a type of prayer that helped the author not only sanctify the things he went about indicating, but also to testify as to the secretive world that he had cultivated throughout his life. The massive construction of schools was, without a doubt, the most important business in the region. The main avenue, aside from the church and the bank, had all other available spaces dedicated to this activity. The learning methods were so effective that they became famous in many surrounding towns. The lines of automobiles that formed on the access roads were long. It became common to see tourists sleeping in their cars or even on the street itself. The appearance of these schools likewise brought about the immigration of a large quantity of musicians. There were aficionados of primitive instruments and performers of classical music. Someone even showed up who invented his own instruments, many of which played themselves. Some of the performers arrived with their families, who settled down in the camps equipped for said means. Certain foreigners could not grasp the reasons for which there were no hotels in the region. Few were those who knew that a decree issued by the women’s committee, overseen decidedly by Rose Plinianson, had forbidden them. At this point it would be fitting to question the authenticity of the exact words that Joseph Roth used to narrate the previous paragraph. At the Kiepenheuer & Witsch publishing house, two versions of this passage exist. Reading the first, which is not the one offered just lines above, one might think that the author treated the story as a finished work… that he wished to prepare the reader for its immediate publication. It is not known where the idea to use dance as the narrative arc capable of transmitting the book’s central idea could have emerged from. Perhaps Joseph Roth was seeking—through the curious mixture of mystical and mythical tendencies of interpretation—a theory in which dance played a fundamental role, to express his vision of the collapse of an entire lineage. It is not by chance that the narrative begins in the era of Russian pogroms and ends a century later. Nor that we see how a community of immigrants goes about gradually shedding itself of its ancient beliefs. Joseph Roth does not portray political regimes carrying out racial cleanses—as some authors tend to do when writing on the topic—but rather he presents the facts in such a way that the decision seems to be taken on, and quite naturally, by the inhabitants of a hypothetical town taken over by hundreds of dance academies. The writer affirms in his story that only the houses lived in by members of the women’s committee remained free of the influence of the academies. The homes of these characters appear here as if they had been constructed around a lake of stagnant waters. The lake and the houses are shown, in this version, to be an awful-smelling place, plagued by insects, and not the beautiful pool supposedly found by Jacob Pliniak in the first account of the facts, when, following innumerable letters written by his brother, he reaches the area, accompanied by Julia and Rose, his adopted daughter. Even less so as the splendid terrain prepared for him by his spiritual brother, Abraham. The houses, says the author in this part of the story, have been built facing a lake of pestilent waters that host an exaggerated swarm of insects, which would render the development of a normal dance-hall impossible. But living in these conditions does not seem to matter to the members of the women’s committee. They have one mission to complete: to close the academies set up in the city. They are not willing to let themselves be defeated and give up their houses, as dozens of families have done in recent years, not only for religious reasons but faced with the offers by the current academy owners. Recently an academy closed down because the committee discovered that the dressing rooms were being used as a place to sleep. They managed to revoke its license, but could not take back the property. The owner was still Pliniak Realty, founded many years back by Jacob’s spiritual brother, Abraham, who did not delay in putting it back up for rent. Nor did the committee let a hand touch the community church, which was in the sights of more than one academy. Other spots that the committee managed to save were the boardwalk and the beach. They managed to issue a prohibition against walking in that area with musical instruments or dance costumes. Any strange movement carried out was punished with a fine. To determine when a dance step began to break the law they had set up discrete signs, on which drawings explained the moment in which the movement began to be dangerous. The clarity with which, in this passage, Joseph Roth’s unspoken ideas about the apostates of his generation are expressed is astonishing. Since the time he lived in his native Galicia, the writer felt like he was living out the last phases of the Jewish spirit. His past appeared to be getting placed on trial by history, he implies in one of his letters—lost in our times—warning, a bit later on, of the complete obviousness of his interpretation of what had occurred. The deepest evil was not necessarily the one that had put the pogroms into play, he pointed out, but rather the one that would attack the faith of the generations who survived them. Jacob Pliniak also pointed out, immediately after subjecting himself to the day’s first ablution, that they needed to proclaim a new way to read the Scriptures. With these affirmations, Jacob Pliniak and Joseph Roth in equal parts seemed to intuit that fate had nothing to do with them. Or at the very least with a religion like the one that they shared. It is not coincidence, then, that just like the penances that Joseph Roth imposed upon himself, mostly characterized by the long and tortured writing sessions to which he obligated himself—brought forth oftentimes in a state of complete inebriation—Jacob Pliniak soaked his skin whenever the slightest opportunity presented itself. Nor that Joseph Roth would come to affirm that not everything was honesty among the members of the city’s women’s committee. He writes that, on one occasion, a scandal broke out involving two of its main members: the respectable Rose Plinianson, the transformed daughter, and the reverend Joshua MacDougal, an aspiring priest well known in the region for acquiring the most awing religious conversions purely by means of spiritual songs. It all started to come to light that Rose Plinianson had begun to participate (although, if you take her later testimony to be true, it was almost without intending to) in the academy fever that suffocated the city. To the surprise of all, Rose Plinianson created, overnight, her own dance academy. This apparent contradiction, which could appear to be a mistake in Joseph Roth’s writing, is possibly part of the reason that the text of The Border is not believed to be completed. In the notebooks of the English investigator who accompanied the writer during his final years, certain notes are marked that describe how Joseph Roth delineated aspects of Miss Rosalyn Plinianson that specifically pertain to the development of this passage. It confirms that the woman created her academy by mistake. What the old woman sought to do was the opposite, to free the city of the scourge of dance. She failed to notice that in doing so, she was creating her own space for dance. The notes assert that Joseph Roth indicates that Miss Rosalyn Plinianson wanted to carry out a series of sessions that, feigning dance recitals, would enable, in reality, the construction of a golem, a traditional archetypal figure capable of quashing the invasion they were
suffering. That is why she needed dance; she had even expressed it to the reverend MacDougal, her spiritual guide. But as the original pages of Joseph Roth remain lost, little can be done to understand the truth of what went on. It is only known that Miss Rosalyn Plinianson equipped a small property that the realtors Pliniak & Co. had abandoned as useless. That place, hidden behind a rock formation, similar in appearance to the one that saved the brother Abraham Pliniak from the holocaust that ended his village, had been used, during the times of slavery, as a maroon colony. As well as years later as a refuge for clandestine alcohol manufacturers. Rose Plinianson cleaned the premises herself and set up, atop a small table, an old record player that she had been storing in the basement of her home. Next to it she placed a modest collection of records of sacred music that she had bought from a traveling salesman that same afternoon when she’d decided to offer her life to her new religion. They went unused, seeing as precisely when she thought to debut them, the women’s committee, whose organization was still incipient, issued its first decree, prohibiting its members from listening to music of any kind. Rose Plinianson nailed on the door a notice seeking a painter who usually strolled the city. After that, she disrobed and put on a pair of high heels. She stationed herself next to the entryway, awaiting students. She had already left a handful of crumbs on the table, which soon became a mound of mud, with the intent—she later said in a whisper to the reverend Joshua MacDougal—that the disciples make a doll while they learned the dance steps. It serves our purposes to dwell on this point of the narration for the sake of considering the elements put into play by the author throughout these lines. We would have to take into account, in order to understand the meaning behind what Joseph Roth allegedly seeks to explain, the close relationship between mysticism and magic in the history of religions. It would appear that the figure of Rose Plinianson had been created solely to confuse certain theorists, who would never anticipate finding, in a character with the traits of this elderly woman, a teacher character, that is to say, a master of the Great Name of God, as the divine messengers are known in certain orders. Dance, nude body, sacred music, pedagogy, curse (symbolized by the unstoppable avalanche of dance academies). All these elements linked up, further more, in such a way that they only provide one possible exit: the construction of a golem, a mud automaton that possesses a kind of life of its own, capable of saving not only this captured town but the entirety of a religious tradition. Rose Plinianson’s act of switching out the crumbs for mud is, consequently, not arbitrary. The organ music, which begins to emit from the record player, does not seem to be loud enough to call anybody’s attention, the author writes almost immediately, as if attempting not to reveal his true intentions. Any sound is drowned out by that produced by the other academies. That may be why the first day is spent alone. Only after a week does it occur to Rose Plinianson to design some informative sheets to point out the exact place where the sessions will take place. At first she tried to make the maps herself. She traced them out in her living room at home. The mosquitos wouldn’t let her work in peace. She constantly had to spray the insecticide she kept beside her stove. She took two days to finish them. During this time, the newly founded academy remained closed. At a certain point she gave up. With such imperfect maps, nobody would be able to get around the rock formation that surrounded the shed where her academy was located. They were poorly drawn and none of them looked the same. The following morning she awoke early and went out to the street dressed in the habit of Sister Gertrude the Venerated, which she had not worn since her mother’s death. She previously had two holy outfits, that of Sister Gertrude the Venerated and that of Grace the Convert. Rose Plinianson had made her mother, Julia Pliniak, wear the Grace the Convert costume as a shroud. She dressed her when she was already deceased, despite her oaths made not to do so during the throes of death. Rose knew her mother was wrong. Before dying, Joseph Roth expressed ideas more or less similar to those professed by Rose Plinianson. He spoke—before converting to Catholicism himself—of the necessity of abandoning old customs. His speaker, the English investigator who followed him in his final years, transcribed them in the notebook she always carried with her (“a book of notes taken” would be a more precise name). Rose Plinianson was not willing to let her mother burn in the eternal flames of hell. To rectify that error, following the funeral she got rid of her adoptive father’s kippah and his copy of the Torah, with which the man had earned a good portion of his living. But unlike the old woman, Joseph Roth did not have many religious objects with which to part. Upon going out to the streets dressed this way, some neighbors looked at Rose Plinianson with awe. The surveyor who lived next door, the old pharmacist, and the seamstress who had her business on the corner all came out to see her walk by. Some made the sign of the cross at her passing, while, at the same time, they turned their backs to her. It might have been necessary to stop at the point of signing the cross and turning their backs, because this far into the story, evil seems to have lost any meaning. Rose Plinianson knew where she was going. She wanted to find the painter who had made the signs on the boardwalk. She knew of potential places where she could find him. More than once she had seen him in the city square drawing the surrounding trees. Or on the beach, ecstatic, facing the waves for hours on end. But where he was most often to be found was on the hill that rose above the central bay. She walked there. Just as she predicted, the painter was there in front of his easel. The palette lay on the ground. The painter therefore had to crouch down every so often to continue the seascape he worked on. That plateau was one of the few places that generations past remembered. From there the old highway could be gazed upon. As well as the beach and the boardwalk. You would have to walk to the edge of the esplanade for the modern buildings to come into view. From that spot two buildings were visible, whose windows shone bright with the sun. All its floors were occupied by dance academies. The rooftops served as enormous dance floors. From the hill the town could be seen in all its splendor. One could never be sure of its true dimensions. From a certain spot it seemed to be a modestly important city, and from another, merely a forgotten ghost town, nothing more. It was situated among farmlands planned out by the area’s colonists who, since the earliest times, had considered themselves obligated to decimate the native inhabitants of the region. Abraham Pliniak’s deals had been with those colonists, who over time had become a sort of aboriginal people. One member of the women’s committee knew that the original settlers, the original inhabitants, had based their social life on the worship of dance. Rose Plinianson interrupted the painter without an introduction. She had little concern for how engrossed he may have been in his work. The artist reacted, leaving a blob on the cloud he was painting. Rose Plinianson asked to go to his house to make the maps. She knew that, in his state, that man could not refuse her offer. It is not known—there is nothing recorded in the English investigator’s notebook regarding this detail—whether or not Joseph Roth was conscious of how unusual the meeting was, on that esplanade, between an elderly woman dressed in a religious habit and a man in the midst of a creative trance. Without a word, the painter began to pack his tools. They included a small wooden box. He put away the palette and brushes, after having washed them with a liquid that he poured from a bottle. He then covered the unfinished painting with blotting paper. He then put the canvas and the paper under his arm. Rose Plinianson asked herself how, taking into account his physical features, he could carry so many things. She wanted to help him, at the very least with the easel. The painter agreed and they took it apart together. Rose Plinianson put on comfortable shoes. Maybe they weren’t specifically made for the elderly, but they were made with worn leather. The painter began to walk quickly. He walked a few steps ahead of her. They went down to the city together. Rose Plinianson wasn’t bothered by the ever-approaching sounds of the academies. She even tried to make sense of them. That practice was similar to the one she attempted when she was silent beneath her wall clock. She always ended up finding s
ome melody. In Korsiakov, before going to sleep, Jacob Pliniak grew accustomed to performing a parallel activity. When his wife Julia left him alone in bed to go tend to the tavern with the young Anselm, he lulled himself to sleep listening to the old clock’s tick-tock. In those moments he recreated in his mind the song that every Orthodox mother used, at least until the sixteenth century, to put her children to sleep. A thousand-year-old song accompanied by the rhythm of the clock was perhaps motive enough to ask a series of questions: Where could Jacob Pliniak have gotten that clock from, which lulled him to sleep when his wife left him alone? And if we start to ask questions of that sort, why did his wife, during her period of infidelity, insist on leaving clues so clearly pointing to her relationship with the young Anselm? Along another line of thought it would be fitting to ask about the possible link between Jacob Pliniak’s interest in the pogroms and his probable hindrance from having children. It has to do with questions whose answers will perhaps never be found, although perhaps the rest of the narration can shed some light. As is known, the painter walked ahead. Rose Plinianson followed one pace behind. While she tried to avoid tripping over the rocks that covered the face of the plateau, she thought of suggesting to the painter that aside from the drawings of the map he also create illustrations for the lessons she thought to offer. Moments later she stopped in her tracks. They had already reached the urban zone. She suddenly placed the easel in the middle of the sidewalk and asked the artist to meet with her in the shed an hour later. Before taking her leave she asked him to bring, aside from his tools for painting, two-dozen white eggs. It was then that she went to visit, after not having done so in several weeks, her old religion teacher, Reverend Joshua MacDougal. They had met years prior, when she was a sort of old little girl and her adoptive father, Jacob Pliniak, had recently disappeared. In those times, they spent long hours seated in front of the church door. As they heard the music from the academies, they seemed to ask themselves how it had been possible for the adopted daughter, Rose Plinianson, to have become the honorable madam, Rose Plinianson, just like that. More than once they questioned, likewise, the true existence of a town like Korsiakov, which Jacob Pliniak spoke so much about up until his final immersion. Could it be real? They would ask each other without ever really, of course, agreeing. They spoke on many occasions of the mysterious castle that supposedly stood in that village, of its gloomy towers. Of Rose’s mother, Julia, who not only tended to the tavern but also exchanged, in a grains shop, the coins that the trafficker, the mysterious Macaque, gave over to her husband the previous nights. The church was one of the few places where the town’s inhabitants could take refuge from the affront of academies. The reverend was not qualified to celebrate mass, but he could rally the parishioners with his songs. He always wore a brown shirt with a priest’s collar. Rose Plinianson sat down on one of her favorite benches. The sea breeze entered through one of the windows. The sun fell mostly on the aisle and the walls to the right. A part of the altar remained in shadow. The reverend had a habit of spinning in the church from dawn until the final afternoon hours. When he saw Rose Plinianson, dressed in habit, he could not hold back an amazed expression. He approached her and kissed one of the fabric’s edges. The sound of the academies became almost imperceptible in these moments. After a few minutes the reverend went towards the altar. The eggs that I have just put on the stove should be ready, he said as he went in through a small door beneath the central crucifixion. Shortly after he came back with a plate of boiled eggs. He offered one to Rose Plinianson, who declined with a gesture. The reverend lived only on eggs cooked this way. At this point, again, the story is interrupted. It is the second time that such an evident break occurs. The first was when Jacob Pliniak was still running his tavern back in the border region, and he is suddenly seen working for some shopkeepers who years back he had helped cross the border. It is thought that today’s missing book passages were present in the original version. They were turned in to the editor’s by the English investigator immediately following Joseph Roth’s death. Nonetheless, Henriette Wolf, the reader contracted back then by the Stroemfeld publishing house, purloined several fragments without anyone understanding, until now, the reasons for such an act. Therefore, the only thing we have today is the following passage, which describes how after seeing the reverend offer a boiled egg, the text moves, without any mediation, to reintroducing Rose Plinianson’s shed equipped for dancing lessons. It is found lit by some torches soaked in alcohol. The insects, which are allegedly a plague in one version of the tale, have here disappeared entirely. It is not the first time that the reverend is found present in that place. On entering, he recognized the cramped quarters where forty years prior his family’s still was set up. In its place, the artist was now seated in front of his easel, contracted to paint the scenes. Likewise we see, on a table, the record player Rose Plinianson had rescued from her house’s basement. The room stays quiet. The distant sound of the academies could only be heard as a vague murmur. The artist did not make the slightest movement. A few records piled up on the floor. The reverend drew closer to see what type of music they contained. They were classical symphonies. He hated those compositions. In that instant, from a place not seen, almost as if it had appeared out of nowhere, the voice of Rose Plinianson emerged, requesting that the discs be played. The reverend seemed to avoid using the device. From the darkness, the voice Rose Plinianson insisted. The artist never interrupted his stillness. His outline defined, the shadow his head projected was somewhat elongated. His gaze did not fix on any point. For some time, that man frequented the church quite often. He tended to sit in a spot close to the altar. He had come to the town with a group of workers that were entrusted with the task of converting the houses into academies. Upon seeing him, the foreman flew into a fit of rage. It couldn’t be that the contracting company had sent a man like this as a worker—he was missing his left arm. Before dismissing him from the group, he spat on the ground with disdain.