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Professor Quemada’s
LAST WORDS

By ERIC GAMALINDA

An angel of the Lord appeared before Professor Artemio Quemada one evening with some very disturbing news that from thereon he could use a word only once, after which he would cease to remember what it meant. In exchange for this he would write some of the most provocative essays of his time. The angel would then come back one day, when he had used up all the words known to man, to transport the professor into the realm beyond words.

Professor Quemada was naturally speechless. Forget the meaning of words? And gradually be condemned to silence when meaning ceases completely to be? The idea excited him, and seemed to him like a good subject for a new thesis: Memory and the Cessation of Meaning: Toward the Invisible Language: An exploration into the outer limits of speech.

“It’s not possible,” he finally told the angel, who as most angels go was endowed with infinite patience and waited as the professor pondered his impending speechlessness.

The angel thought (because angels think, but do not speak) this was a plausible argument and concluded that articles, conjunctions, prepositions, etcetera would be exempt from the rule. But, it added, the rule applied to all the equivalent words in all other languages living or dead all over the world.

“All right,” Professor Quemada said, a little exasperatedly. “I’ll play your game. Senility would probably get me before the game does.” The professor was 78 years old. He reached out to shake the angel’s hand (one must observe proper decorum even under exceptional situations) and when he touched its hand it felt like water.

The professor woke up at this point. But a stranger thing happened. The angel was still there even when he was awake. It hovered over him like a perfect hologram, giving the room a faint, moon-like glow. Its translucent robes shimmered like diaphanous ripples, and it had fingers of (what did it look like?) alabaster or porcelain.

The professor crossed himself and sighed, “This is indeed a very strange dream.”

And slowly, the angel in the dream dissolved to mist and was gone.

To foil death (because that was he understood the angel’s bargain — the professor had always believed that the end of speech was the end of life itself), he began to use words not commonly understood except by a cabal of his closest peers: words that he needed to use only once in his life, and for which he had no immediate need. The result was a series of essays and lectures on the most esoteric subjects in the world, held together by a supreme logic and fluid structure, not to mention — to quote hundreds of reviews and papers churned out by Ph.D.’s — sharpness of vision and clarity of purpose, Journals praised him as the rightful heir to Derrida, Foucault, Braudillard, all the droppable names and current darlings of the academe. Rival professors slung mud, backstabbed and let loose the green-eyed monster, but no one could outwrite the professor. Eventually, when he ran out of words, he created neologisms, and his obscurantism was further hailed as the new Joycean language, the Esperanto of the Cognoscenti.

His books were translated and read in all the major languages of the world. His name was mentioned everywhere, from the highways of Hungary (highway = orzaguti) to the stockmarkets of Indonesia (stock market = pasar uang). The newspapers of Czechoslovakia lovingly paid tribute (newspaper = noviny) while Norwegian television broadcast his interviews (television = fjernsyn). Not just babies, but ordinary things were named after him, from the cucumber of Swahili (cucumber = tango) to the dances of nomadic Arabs (dance = raqs).

Nobody knew that Professor Quemada was losing all his words. Nobody knew that deep in the fiber of his soul, in the tunnels of his blood, in the vortices of his lungs and the orbits of his intestines was an enormous vacuum. No, not emptiness, not solitude, not loneliness: but silence.

She drove up to him one afternoon as he was standing by the curb to wait for a cab. All his life the professor never learned to drive, even though he had the wherewithal to buy a chauffered limousine. He didn’t trust machines, and men who operated them much less. The girl was a student of his whom he had noticed a few times but had not really paid much attention to.

“Can I take you anywhere, professor?” the girl asked him. She had a roundish face and very deep, intense eyes that glimmered even if they showed a lack of trust for anything in the world. She was very dark, and her hair had the sheen only deep black hair could emit. The professor sat beside her and spoke not a word, except to ask her name. She said something — the professor, who by now was hard of hearing, caught the tailend of it; the name sounded like Willie, but wasn’t that a boy’s name? He didn’t bother to ask again, because he knew that it he mentioned her name she would vanish before his eyes. No, not her, but the very presence that made his heart jump as he slipped into the car, the very essence that moved him to veer his eyes slowly, surreptitiously toward her arms as she maneuvered the wheel. This same incomprehensible entity was the one whose softly rounded legs were stepping lightly on the gas, the same one whose hair slapped teasingly against her forehead each time the light turned read and the car stopped and she turned to look at him and ask him why he was so quiet.

He lived and breathed her vowed he would die if he spent another day without seeing her again. And every morning he marveled at the renewal of life that she had given him, because ever since his wife died — many cold and sleepless nights ago — he had lost that aggressiveness made much of by men in their youth. He stared at the strange, revenant creature under the sheets and in those mornings recalled with sadness and desire the instinctive passions from which he had sublimated all his words, all his fire. She was frequently absent from class, and he began to invent strange situations explaining why. Finally, one day she was back, and the professor sputtered through his lecture (Magnificent as usual! gushed the students) and rushed back to the curb to catch her driving past. She stopped as she had done that fateful afternoon. She opened the door, poked her head out and said, “Professor, let me take you to your stop.” He hopped in, and immediately upon settling himself into the seat he voiced out his unrehearsed protestations, spilling out the words as clumsily as a schoolboy, and declared his love.

“I would love to marry the greatest philosopher of my time,” she said. “But I just got married last week.”

“Tell me his name,” the professor said.

“Theodor,” she said. “The one who sits beside me in your class.”

“Theodor,” the professor said. “Theodor, Theodor.” And he kept saying the name until it was no more than an echo in his mind.

He wrote more essays, published more books, became even more famous. Bibliographies burst with references to his new works:
Quemada, A. Apophthegm and Variations. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1991.
Quemada, A. Catharsis and Necrophilia: An Investigation into the Future of Japanese Short Fiction. Kodansha International, Tokyo 1992.
Quemada, A. Deconstructing Deconstruction. Editions Gallimard, Paris 1992.
Quemada, A. Waking Up the Dead: New Poems from Dying Civilizations. Faber and Faber, London 1993.

But every morning he still had his erections, and they became so persistent that on certain days he had to go about his lecture tours with the uncomfortable explosion boiling over his loins. He wrote incessant (although private) treatises about her, scribbled poems for her: long arduous divagations whose meaning was lost each time he reached the final word. He stared for long hours at the moon, but always the vision that stayed in his mind was the slow curve of her arms, the mounds of her thighs: that afternoon in the car. He pictured her in so many situations alone in his room, tied up and spread eagled under him, or curled to a tight embrace. Always she would offer her nipples for him to suckle, and the sweet milk of her love would flow in teasing trickles. Her lips burned with kisses. Her eyes extinguished his world and hers, and when she closed them they were like two bright suns imploding, drawing him in.

And then one morning he woke up with the horrifying realization that he couldn’t remember his own name.

The angel of the Lord appeared again two years later to find Professor Quemada a much older man.

The professor looked up at the angel and nodded his head. He stood up slowly and held up his hand for the angel to hold. “Tell me,” he said. “What was she called?”

“Vida,” the angel said (or seemed to), and the professor repeated the word as they walked out of the room. He kept saying it over and over like a mantra, and each time the syllables sputtered from his tired lips and fell on the ground and sprouted into small, wild flowers. He felt nothing, only the fluid touch of the angel; there was a pervading scent about them, perhaps of garlic and lavender, emanating from its robes of light. It was evening. The professor looked up at the sky and saw two moons, and a ring of planets circling above them. It was, he thought, the strangest night he had ever seen.