Minding One's P's and Q's

Minding One’s P’s and Q’s

Gilfredo walked up the stairs of his office building slowly, thinking that he hadn’t been in his own office as much recently as he used to; he’d been staying at home, drinking more and more, doing scholarly activities less and less. He blamed this on a young graduate student, Maya, who had chosen to make his life hell, presumably as punishment for his amorous affection being removed; she was, after all, a terrible poet, and she had gained a hundred pounds since the time he’d been seeing her, maybe a couple of years ago. He caught his breath, climbing the steps; the office building was at the same time very familiar, and also just a little tense.

He was an Argentine poet and a full professor; he knew all the Argentine poets he had grown up with, but he specialized in a Cuban poet, and could talk for hours about the beauty of the Spanish language when it was bound up in the enchantment of poetry. Sometimes in the rhythm of his own steps he would hear the words of the poets, or the beauty of the language, but this was in better times. Now his steps sounded more like a nails sealing his own coffin. He intentionally recalled great Spanish poetry, trying to reverse the downward spiral of his thoughts; it wasn’t working. Each step seemed like a thorn in his side, rather than a beautiful syllable of a beautiful language.

Expounding on the beauty and grace of the Spanish language: this was how he met Marcelline, a woman in his own building, a French teacher who had recently been studying logic as part of semantics and thus as part of language. He had enchanted her by telling her about how, in his generation, they studied logic along with Latin, and he’d told her about a Latin teacher who had been one of his inspirations. Here in the US, it was similar; back in the old days, namely the turn of the previous century, in certain schools, logic was one of the hardest subjects students would take, and they would refer to it as “p’s and q’s” as in “minding one’s p’s and q’s” – which was, in essence, hitting the books.  He’d had a logic teacher who had been a monster, abusive and cruel, but he’d survived, and he was proud of it. He’d studied the great Spanish poets, and studied in England. With Marcelline, he’d gone on to tell her about the Argentine poets, and, of course, his own favorite Cuban poet, and he was, at this moment, climbing the stairs in hopes of maintaining an amorous relationship with Marcelline, who had implied she would be in her office at this hour, after class.

He could, of course, take the elevator, but the elevator made him feel old, and he was only 56. It was almost twenty years ago, he thought, thinking in years, that his first wife had left him. She, too, was Argentine; she was disappointed that they hadn’t had a child by then; but most of all, she simply wanted to go home. She wasn’t happy in the USA, and she’d let him know that. He’d been quite stubborn about it; he was successful here; he’d become a professor; he’d impressed everyone, and his career, basically, was here. The sadness of that breakup had haunted him.

At first, he had enjoyed his freedom, seeing woman after woman, many of them in this building, which was like a little Europe. He courted Portuguese teachers, Italian teachers, even a German professor. He had wild nights on the town with beautiful, well-educated young women.  

Everyone seemed to tolerate it; he was, after all, a tenured professor. But this young poet, Maya, had basically ruined it all, in his view. She had come along at a time of weakness for him, and somehow he didn’t see what an unhappy person she was, not to mention the fact that she was a bad poet. At a reading one time she was reading her poetry, and he was admiring her figure, when all of a sudden he caught himself listening to the words, and having to admit that, yes, it was pretty bad. What was he doing? What had he stooped to? What had gone wrong?

The other day, someone had asked him why windows in the building could never open. They were sealed shut, and that was no doubt because a central-air system meant that an open window would mean that the building would be air conditioning a very hot outdoor patio, or trying to heat a very cold winter day. But what it had meant, in the long run, was that every single person in the building had become accustomed to being cut off from the outdoors, operating, if they were lucky, with a window to look out of, but not a window to breathe out of, or yell out of. The building was a fortress, sealed off from the invading world, closed off except at the front and back doors. He thought of this, sometimes, as he compared it to Europe, say, or even to the USA. Places become insular, he thought, as do the people in them, cut off from reality, unable to feel something obvious in the air.

Marcelline had given him hope again, though even Marcelline looked at him sometimes as if she’d been through a few relationships herself, and wasn’t going to be so quick to trust him. The hallway that he now walked down was full of signs that said “No means No!”, and he looked at them, thinking of their discussion of logic. You’d think that, in a building where everyone taught various languages, “No” would be the most basic word, the first one, one that you wouldn’t have to argue about. Didn’t it translate as “No” in Portuguese, French, or German?

He knew that in fact these signs were part of a campaign, in which women, particularly professional women on campus, were enraged by a fraternity whose members had allowed themselves to be photographed publically with a sign that said “No means Yes” – it was more complicated than that, but it was blatantly disrespectful to women, and the women on campus had responded with these signs. It all made sense, in context, of course, if one understood the campus and what was happening on it. But from a purely logical point of view, it was somewhat absurd, and it reminded him of that logic teacher so many decades ago.

Of course, he couldn’t bring this up with Marcelline; she had a similar sign on her office as well. It would simply make her mad; there was always the possibility that she would think he “didn’t get it” or “didn’t take it seriously.” On the contrary, he thought, he took it too seriously. He read it for what it was. He remembered his education in logic, every hour of it, and it came boiling to the surface at moments like this.

The case with Maya was slow in working its way through the system; it was unresolved. Maya had complained to the highest authorities, saying that he was using his sexual involvement with her, and the personal fallout from the breakup, against her in her pursuit of a PhD. His view was the opposite, that if anything, his involvement had helped her, had taken her much further than she deserved, and his lack of support now was simply forcing her to get the PhD. on her own, without his help. He didn’t feel like he was preventing her from doing anything. And he felt like everyone – chair, ombudsman, provost – was colluding to make his life miserable.

Perhaps Marcelline could change his mood, and make him feel worthy again. But, alas, there was a note on Marcelline’s office door, addressed to him, and basically telling him she was busy for the evening, and was sorry to back out of whatever engagement he had planned. Now in fact, as he went over exactly what he did have planned, and how much of this he had actually communicated successfully with her, he was sorry to admit that it was all very vague, and he was sure she knew what he had truly intended, and had simply rejected that. Perhaps she had done her homework, or had heard through the grapevine about the situation with Maya; or, perhaps she was truly busy, and would be glad to make other arrangements later. There was no way of knowing whether this was a temporary or permanent setback.

In this picture, of course, things were very rarely direct, and Gilfredo had long ago become used to this way of operating; he’d even mastered it. But now he felt like he was a victim of it, in that he didn’t know where he stood. The “No means No!” signs seemed to mock him, as he stood there, in the hallway. Things had, in fact, come to this, and it wasn’t pretty. He was entirely alone, up there in that hallway, and badly needed another drink.

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