The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 88

once about it, though he referred to it often, obliquely, metaphorically. It was a long talk, what I understand now was a confession to the only man he thought then was still alive who had witnessed what he had done. He said he did not know who his natural father was, only that he was from the West Indies, an islander, probably dead. He knew his mother had been in a Cuban monastery, as either a student or servant. Either she had died, or run away, or become a nun. Lazarus, as an infant, had been placed in an orphanage in Cuba and then transported by mysterious means to another orphanage in the American state of Florida. Through Roman Catholic Church auspices, he had been adopted at the age of four by the Furores, along with Orlando the Black and Babe, who had been resident in the same orphanage. Lazarus was schooled by Dominican priests in Chicago, a private school, exclusive, almost entirely white except for him and his new brothers. There, he said, he learned disgust for the Roman Catholic Church, what Lazarus called “holy chains.” He said that only once; it was atypical of his sense of humor. Did Lazarus have a sense of humor? Yes, he was readily amused by hypocrisy, his own and everyone else’s.

Lazarus concluded his confession by saying that, when he had attacked Father Saint Stephen, he had been out of his mind with revulsion for what he said was the pious gangsterism of the Church that had crushed his mother, and very likely shamed her to give up her bastard to strangers.

Then he seemed to reformulate, clarify, that mind of his, pounding, forging: “I killed him because I felt like it. It was stupid, an intellectual waste. What’s the point of silencing a madman? It hurt me more than him. He was out of his mind, and I let him pull me out of mine. It was sickening, to lose control like that. What you talk about, when you went crazy at Stanley, that sounds a lot like what I felt. I was angry! And I acted in a manner I absolutely revile and reject. It was like the beast in me, or . . . awful, Grim, awful to remember. Did I know what I was doing? Yes, I did. And what’s the difference between a murderer who knows why he kills and one who doesn’t? None. I had cause to kill and I did. It was still stupid. I think about my father. Did he know what killed him, or why, or why he abandoned my mother and me? I know why. That is important. What I have, by accident, is the means to act on my cognition. I have an excellent education, despite all the claptrap about the mysteries of the spirit, and I have a sense of history that is completely modern. What Longfaeroe would say was a vision of history. It isn’t magic, like your mother’s. It isn’t xenophobic, like your Grandfather’s. It is logical and informed, and just. And I have a place to apply my gifts, here, now. It is mine to do or to fail. I must succeed. I think of an American revolutionary, John Adams—a white master, yes, but a republican all the same, swept along by the truth of egalitarian justice—and how he felt when he was elected to the outlawed Continental Congress, which marked him for hanging by the tyrants. He wrote, ‘I wander alone, and ponder. I muse, I mope, I ruminate. We have not men fit for the times. We are deficient in Genius, in Education, in Gravel, in Fortune, in every Thing. I feel unutterable anxiety.’ That is how it always feels in a struggle against tyranny and for justice. That is why you feel inadequate, spun around. We must be fit for our times, Grim. When I killed that madman, I was not fit. When you killed at Stanley, you were not fit. Now, we are. I say so. We must build. Any campesino can kill. We must succeed. If not? There is no if not. Death in any form would be less terrible.”

I did not think to tell Lazarus at the time that he had explained his crime in almost the same words that Peregrine used to explain his murder of Cesare Furore, “because I wanted to” and “because I felt like it.” I wonder now if Lazarus knew. There seems to me a profound difference between killing a number of human beings and murdering one man intimately. I have done both, many times, and believe that while killing many—war—is often a consequence of events, a tactical decision, vicious, but often meant purposely, a murder of one man is an act of willful blasphemy. There are sophistic excuses for the mass killer; there is no balm for the murderer. A single murder, call it an assassination, corrodes the will that engenders it. It corrupts. The Norse had another way of saying this: “The dead man lives in the face of the slayer.” This means that the conflict that moved one to assassinate is not resolved by physical death. Assassination did transform Lazarus, taint him, weigh him down with Father Saint Stephen’s nature. The Norse would have said that Lazarus was haunted by Father Saint Stephen’s ghost. Lazarus seemed driven to create a people’s republic in order to prove to himself that a man who has freed himself of “holy chains” is right, and that one, like Father Saint Stephen, who celebrates human death as the most courageous human journey, is wrong. Lazarus had taken Grandfather’s verdict on Father Saint Stephen to heart—the priest was not only mad but also wrong. This fetches me, that my grandfather should have colored Lazarus, too. I am not saying that I saw Grandfather or Father Saint Stephen in Lazarus’s face, but then, I did.

I suggest that Lazarus, a man who dismissed orthodox religion as irrational, and even denounced art as antirational,