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"Helen, would you mind explaining to me what you mean in the second paragraph on Page 3, the part where you speak of the 'hagiography' of a 'mendacious Stalinist'? I don't understand that paragraph very well." I was not lying. I had had to look up "hagiography."

She was tough; she looked me right in the eye.

"It can mean a whole lot of things," she said. "It's about Castro, the Cuban Revolution, all that stuff."

"OK," I said. "What about Castro? What is a 'hagiography'?"

"Well, " she said, not even looking down at the ground like I expected, "it's, you know, the sort of thing that they always say about guys like that."

"What sort of things, what are you really saying in that paragraph?" I was beginning to feel a little like a child abuser. She didn't help. Turning directly toward me, Helen said, "Hey, what are you trying to do to me? What's all this about, huh?"

"Look, I'm just trying to get to the bottom of your paper." Oh man, why couldn't I just plain accuse her of plagiarizing the thing?

But she was up and leaving, enough already.

I spent two or three hours trying to track down the source of the essay in book review digests, on the Internet, the whole bit. Nothing showed up. I started to call her, but hung up before dialing her number.

Instead, I called the vice president for instruction to ask her advice.

"What's a 'hagiography'?" she said.

"It's like, oh, making a mountain out of a molehill, " I replied.

Sometime later I discussed the Beverly and Helen phenomenon with an old buddy on the faculty.

"Ask them to write a personal essay describing their feelings in response to the novel," he said. I imagined Beverly writing three or four pages about how Artemio Cruz "makes me feel bad, you know, just to know that things like that happened in the time of Gen. Obregon." I imagined Helen writing about having had a dream, "you know, with Jungian archetypes personified by Pilar and Celia in their struggles with the personal unconscious." Bev could turn anything into historical research and Helen probably could plagiarize the back of her hand.

"Look," I said to my friend sarcastically, "I'm going back to the old method. Question 1: Locate Mexico on a map of the world. Question 2: How old was Artemio Cruz when the federales hanged his girlfriend? Beverly and Helen wouldn't have any trouble with questions like that. They would both be 'A' students, and I wouldn't feel so oppressed."

My friend looked at me for a moment, and said, "Come on, you're not oppressed. Why don't you admit that you were entertained by the whole thing. Besides, give me the name of a novel you read when you were a sophomore in college, something you were required to read," he said.

"OK, 'The Plague,' Camus, in French, mind you."

"Name a character."

I couldn't remember any.

"One of them was a doctor, I think," my friend said.

"Yeah, one of them was a doctor," I said.

Then he threw me the curve.

"OK, tell me the name of the French general who was the leading spokesman for the colonials in Algeria?"

Shit. I remembered it. "Jacques Soustelle," I mumbled.

"See," he said. "She was right. Forget about Fuentes. Forget the whole thing. Gen. Obregon is where it's at."

Ah, the elusive nature of human knowing. Novels and poems live in a nether world that seems so remote from the facticity of modern life; they are so easy to dismiss as irrelevant, their voices like haunting songs. Beverly and Helen did not want to venture into that mysterious place, not now, not yet, maybe never. Perhaps "Artemio Cruz" was too difficult for them. I don't know. I still don't know if I did the right thing. Somehow I had begun seeing students like Beverly and Helen as characters in a novel themselves, entitled to their own ambiguity.

And, my friend was right. I was entertained. Maybe I will end this career having lost the capacity for righteous indignation.
salon.com | Sept. 24, 1999

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