La Misma
If I wore a red parka, thought Casey, I could fit right in. I could pass for a student. Well maybe a T.A.
Casey Lasko, the somewhat over-qualified assistant to the vice-president for prime-time programming of the Encore!!! Network, was hurrying toward the campus of Indiana University. He had two appointments, both in Ballantine Hall, somewhere in the interior of IU, beyond the predictable grid system of the Bloomington streets. Everyone at the B&B breakfast table had advised against taking a car onto campus, so Casey made his way, on foot, toward the university and into a crush of students with backpacks and parkas. The surge of sidewalk traffic pulled him through large gray stone gates, then dropped him in the relative solitude of a wooded area with snowy trails. Campus map in hand, Casey followed the paths, slippery bricks under the fresh snow, rough bridges over frozen ravines, until Ballantine Hall—monumental, neglected, severe, a ministry out of Kafka—loomed over him.
He took the rumbling elevator to the top floor—the ninth. He checked his watch. Five minutes early. Then, standing beside a bulletin board thick with conference flyers and calls for papers, each stamped with a removal date, Casey waited for his first appointment: Anitza Zubiondo, professor of Comparative Literature.
The night before, on a somewhat balky Internet connection at the B&B, Casey had learned everything he could about Anitza. The daughter of Uruguayan expatriate academics, she had been born in Moscow, where her father was earning his doctorate, and grew up in Lyon, Birmingham, Hanover and Toronto, among other places. After experimenting with a variety of lifestyles (a commune in Copenhagen, a marriage in Saskatchewan, etc.), she earned her own Ph.D. (SUNY Buffalo, 1984), and, with equal fervor, rejected the orthodox leftism of her parents and the bourgeois complacencies of her North American neighbors.
Anitza arrived about twenty minutes late, and admitted Casey into her office in a flurry of scarves, coats and book bags. She didn’t have much time, a situation she seemed to blame on Casey. But he held his ground, complimented her on her tassel earrings, and made it clear he wouldn’t leave until she told him about Victor Damiani.
“Victor… Damiano… Certainly I know Victor,” she said. “Although I must say it took a while for him to register, do you know what I mean?”
Casey didn’t say, “Of course I do! Tell me about it anyway!” But that’s what he thought, and he let his face communicate the idea.
“Well,” said Anitza. “During Victor’s first semester or two in the graduate program—he seemed a certain type, silent in the classroom, doomed to incomplete grades and eventual departure… ”
Anitza sighed. “Such students,” she explained, “You have to understand—typically they would have been language majors as undergraduates, often with advanced levels of fluency, native speakers, perhaps, or from bilingual immigrant families… It’s rather sad sometimes…
“You see, undergraduate programs in various languages often reward students who express themselves with idiomatic competence, even if the ideas expressed are simply received opinion. Whereas in the graduate program in Comparative Literature, we place a premium on making original contributions to the contemporary critical conversation. We demand both freshness and theoretical rigor in our discourse. Some students struggle with the transition. The problem is especially severe—and I’ve said this openly in our Humanities curricular review—among some students who emerge out of our own Department of French and Italian, in particular those students who have formed a bond, shall we say, with a certain former chair of that department…
“During his first semester in our program, I let Victor Damiano—to the extent I noticed him—be subsumed into that category—superior skills on the language side, inferior on the critical side. I recall one unfortunate paper in which he attempted to refute Derrida with quotations from Dante—quotations that practically telegraphed the influence of a humanist sensibility that had grown tired by the late nineteen-fifties. During that semester I believe I was his advisor, and I’m sure I would have suggested that he transfer to the School of Education, for teacher certification at the secondary level, if he had shown his face in my office, which I don’t believe he did… ”
Casey listened patiently.
“So I must admit I was rather surprised,” said Anitza, “when Victor approached me last semester with an idea for his master’s thesis—an idea that showed that he was beginning to get it—that he had finally entered the contemporary problem space—the room, if you will, where our critical conversation occurs. Don’t look at me like that, I’m quite serious—he came to me with an idea that had real promise. Victor had been watching quite a few telenovelas—en español of course, a language in which he was quite capable, his third or fourth idioma, I think—and he had become fascinated by the way the characters seemed bound to each other by a superfluity of relationships—a network with too many links.”
“You know how these shows work—how when the handsome cop’s sad sack partner finally gets a date, well it can’t be just any chica, it has to be the estranged daughter of the successful artist who has just given shelter to—and become a sort of surrogate father for—the hero of the show, a former petty criminal and talented young painter whom the cops are pursuing for a murder he didn’t commit—to take an example that Victor mentioned and I recognized right away...
“His idea reminded me of the work of Ortega Acuña, who studied the role of telenovelas in the lives of immigrants from a village in Chiapas now living in a Houston barrio—it’s really sociology, not critical discourse, but I thought it was something Victor simply had to deal with—and of course, I pointed him toward the ground-breaking studies of Kraszewski-Zevallos, who argues, quite convincingly, that the frequent use of incestuous situations in telenovela plots can be read as a transposition of repressed homoeroticism… ”
Casey respectfully jotted down the names of Ortega Acuña and Kraszewski-Zevallos, then asked Professor Zubiondo when she had last spoken to Victor.
“Oh, a couple of months ago. Just before winter break. He requested a semester’s leave of absence to finish his research. I asked a few questions to make sure the project was still on track. He volunteered that he had a title: La Misma Persona: My Mother’s Husband’s Lover is Your Father’s Daughter’s Nurse, and a subtitle: The Hermeneutics of Overrelationship. That’s well and good, I told him, if somewhat premature. You see, I discourage the selection of titles until the first draft is completed. So I pushed him a little. What will you be saying about the hermeneutics of overrelationship? Why does this structure matter?
“That’s when Victor told me he had made a major discovery. Every character, he said, in every telenovela is related to every other character in at least 6.28 different ways.
“I asked him about that number… 6.28? Why so precise?
“He told me it was pi times two. Pi, as in geometry.
“For a moment, I wondered what was going on in his mind. But he seemed to be in such a solid place. Very sure of himself. So I signed the paper for his leave.”
“And you haven’t seen him since?” said Casey.
“No. Not this semester. I encouraged him to stay in touch, but he hasn’t.”
Casey thanked Professor Zubiondo for her time, gathered his things, and made his way to the door. She dug into one of her bags and found a cell phone. Casey stopped at the door, and then, like the detective in a television mystery, turned to ask one more question. Did she know why Victor might use the name di Savoia? Anitza paused in the act of calling and laughed.
“Not unless he’s planning to claim the throne… ” she said.
Casey asked what she meant.
“di Savoia is the name of the Italian royal family,” she said. “The deposed royal family. He uses that name?”
Casey nodded. “He sent a treatment to Hollywood. As Damien di Savoia Underwood.”
“When you find him,” she said, “tell him I’d like to see him. Just to be sure he’s OK.”
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