Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [43]
“Let me hear you say it,” he said. “Say it several times.”
So I did. “The Emperor has no clothes, the Emperor has no clothes, the Emperor has no clothes.”
“That was a really fine performance,” he said, “really topping, really first rate.” He clapped his hands appreciatively.
How was I supposed to respond to that? I felt like Alice in Wonderland.
“I want you to say that out loud and with just that degree of conviction,” he said, “anytime anyone has anything good to say about so-called modern art.”
“O.K.,” I said.
“It’s the work of swindlers and lunatics and degenerates,” he said, “and the fact that many people are now taking it seriously proves to me that the world has gone mad. I hope you agree.”
“I do, I do,” I said. It sounded right to me.
“Mussolini thinks so, too,” he said. “Do you admire Mussolini as much as I do?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“You know the first two things Mussolini would do if he took over this country?” he said.
“No, sir,” I said.
“He would burn down the Museum of Modern Art and outlaw the word democracy. After that he would make up a word for what we really are, make us face up to what we really are and always have been, and then strive for efficiency. Do your job right or drink castor oil!”
About a year later, I got around to asking him what he thought the people of the United States really were, and he said, “Spoiled children, who are begging for a frightening but just Daddy to tell them exactly what to do.”
“Draw everything the way it really is,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
He pointed to a clipper ship model on a mantelpiece in the murky distance. “That, my boy, is the Sovereign of the Seas,” he said, “which, using nothing but wind power, was faster than most freighters are today! Think of that!”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“And when you put it into the wonderful picture you are going to paint of this studio, you and I are going to go over your rendering of it with a magnifying glass. Any line in the rigging I care to point to: I expect you to tell me its name and what its function is.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Pablo Picasso could never do that,” he said.
“No, sir,” I said.
He removed from a gun rack a Springfield 1906 rifle, then the basic weapon for the United States Infantry. There was an Enfield rifle in there, too, the basic weapon of the British Infantry, a sort of gun which may have killed him. “When you include this perfect killing machine in your picture,” he said of the Springfield, “I want it so real that I can load it and shoot a burglar.” He pointed to a nubbin near the muzzle and asked me what it was.
“I don’t know, sir,” I said.
“The bayonet stud,” he said. He promised me that he was going to triple or quadruple my vocabulary, starting with the parts of the rifle, each of which had a specific name. We would go from that simple exercise, he said, required of every Army recruit, to the nomenclature of all the bones, sinews, organs, tubes and wires in the human body, required of every student in medical school. This had been required of him as well, he said, during his Moscow apprenticeship.
He asserted that there would be a spiritual lesson for me in my study of the simple rifle and then the bewilderingly complex human body, since it was the human body the rifle was meant to destroy.
“Which represents good and which represents evil—” he asked me, “the rifle or the rubbery, jiggling, giggling bag of bones we call the body?”
I said that the rifle was evil and the body was good.
“But don’t you know that this rifle was designed to be used by Americans defending their homes and honor against wicked enemies?” he said.
So I said a lot depended on whose body and whose rifle we were talking about, that either one of them could be good or evil.
“And who renders the final decision on that?” he said.
“God?” I said.
“I mean here on Earth,” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said.