The Handmaid's Tale(63)

“Tell me,” he says. Distanced, but more alert, or am I imagining it?

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum,” I say.

“What?” he says.

I haven’t pronounced it properly. I don’t know how. “I could spell it,” I say. “Write it down.”

He hesitates at this novel idea. Possibly he doesn’t remember I can. I’ve never held a pen or a pencil, in this room, not even to add up the scores. Women can’t add, he said once, jokingly. When I asked him what he meant, he said, For them, one and one and one and one don’t make four.

What do they make? I said, expecting five or three.

Just one and one and one and one, he said.

But now he says, “All right,” and thrusts his roller-tip pen across the desk at me almost defiantly, as if taking a dare. I look around for something to write on and he hands me the score pad, a desk-top notepad with a little smile-button face printed at the top of the page. They still make those things.

I print the phrase carefully, copying it down from inside my head, from inside my closet. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Here, in this context, it’s neither prayer nor command, but a sad graffiti, scrawled once, abandoned. The pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it contains. Pen Is Envy, Aunt Lydia would say, quoting another Centre motto, warning us away from such objects. And they were right, it is envy. Just holding it is envy. I envy the Commander his pen. It’s one more thing I would like to steal.

The Commander takes the smile-button page from me and looks at it. Then he begins to laugh, and is he blushing? “That’s not real Latin,” he says. “That’s just a joke.”

“A joke?” I say, bewildered now. It can’t be only a joke. Have I risked this, made a grab at knowledge, for a mere joke? “What sort of a joke?”

“You know how schoolboys are,” he says. His laughter is nostalgic, I see now, the laughter of indulgence towards his former self. He gets up, crosses to the bookshelves, takes down a book from his trove; not the dictionary though. It’s an old book, a textbook it looks like, dog-eared and inky. Before showing it to me he thumbs through it, contemplative, reminiscent; then, “Here,” he says, laying it open on the desk in front of me.

What I see first is a picture: the Venus de Milo, in a black-and-white photo, with a moustache and a black brassiere and armpit hair drawn clumsily on her. On the opposite page is the Coliseum in Rome, labelled in English, and below a conjugation: sum es est, sumus estis sunt. “There,” he says, pointing, and in the margin I see it, written in the same ink as the hair on the Venus. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

“It’s sort of hard to explain why it’s funny unless you know Latin,” he says. “We used to write all kinds of things like that. I don’t know where we got them, from older boys perhaps.” Forgetful of me and of himself, he’s turning the pages. “Look at this,” he says. The picture is called The Sabine Women, and in the margin is scrawled: pim pis pit, pimus pistis pants. “There was another one,” he says. “Cim, cis, cit …” He stops, returning to the present, embarrassed. Again he smiles; this time you could call it a grin. I imagine freckles on him, a cowlick. Right now I almost like him.

“But what did it mean?” I say.

“Which?” he says. “Oh. It meant, ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’ I guess we thought we were pretty smart, back then.”

I force a smile, but it’s all before me now. I can see why she wrote that, on the wall of the cupboard, but I also see that she must have learned it, here, in this room. Where else? She was never a schoolboy. With him, during some previous period of boyhood reminiscence, of confidences exchanged. I have not been the first then. To enter his silence, play children’s word games with him.

“What happened to her?” I say.

He hardly misses a beat. “Did you know her somehow?”

“Somehow,” I say.

“She hanged herself,” he says; thoughtfully, not sadly. “That’s why we had the light fixture removed. In your room.” He pauses. “Serena found out,” he says, as if this explains it. And it does.

If your dog dies, get another.

“What with?” I say.

He doesn’t want to give me any ideas. “Does it matter?” he says. Torn bedsheet, I figure. I’ve considered the possibilities.

“I suppose it was Cora who found her,” I say. That’s why she screamed.

“Yes,” he says. “Poor girl.” He means Cora.

“Maybe I shouldn’t come here any more,” I say.