Woes of the True Policeman

In a nutshell, she wrote at the end of the letter, she was happy and life couldn’t be better. In this sense, she confessed, I’m a little like Candide, and my teacher, Pangloss, is this fascinating part of Mexico. My father, too — though actually no, my father is nothing at all like Pangloss.

Jordi read the letter in the subway. He had no idea who Candide and Pangloss were, but it seemed to him that his friend was at the gates of paradise while he was stuck permanently in purgatory.

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At night, after they had watched a movie together on TV, he asked his father who Candide and Pangloss were.

“Two characters from Voltaire,” said Antoni Carrera.

“Yes, but who are they,” asked Jordi, to whom Voltaire sounded vaguely like some cabaret or rock band.

“The characters in a philosophical novel,” said Antoni Carrera, “but you should know that by now. Is this for some school project?”

“No. It’s personal,” said Jordi, feeling that his house was suffocating him. The furniture, the TV, the yard with the lights on, everything was suddenly oppressive.

“Candide is the quintessential innocent, and Pangloss is, too, more or less.”

“Pangloss is his teacher?”

“Yes. He’s a philosopher. The classic optimist. Like Candide, except that Candide is an optimist by nature and Pangloss argues rationally for optimism. He’s a moron, basically.”

“And is the novel set in Mexico?”

“No, I don’t think so. Pangloss teaches theology, metaphysics, cosmology, and nigology, and don’t ask me what that is because I don’t know.”

“Nigology. Huh,” said Jordi.

That night he looked up nigology in the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. He couldn’t find it. Those fucking professors, he thought angrily. The closest thing was nigola: (Naut.) Lengths of thin line strung between the shrouds of a sailing ship to make a ladder; ratline. To sail amid the rigging and the topsails! There was also nigromancia, or necromancy, the meaning of which Jordi knew thanks to role-playing games, and also nigérrimo, ma. (Del lat. Nigerrimus.) adj. sup. de negro. Negrísimo, very black.

Nor was it in the Ideological Dictionary of the Spanish Language by Julio Casares or in the Pompeu I Fabra.

Much later, while his parents were sleeping, he got out of bed naked, and with measured steps, as if he were on a phantom basketball court, he headed for his father’s library and searched until he found a Spanish translation of Candide.

He read: “It is clear,” said Pangloss, “that things cannot be otherwise than they are, for since everything is made to serve an end, everything necessarily serves the best end. Observe: noses were made to support spectacles, hence we have spectacles. Legs, as anyone can plainly see, were made to be breeched, and so we have breeches. Stones were made to be shaped and to build castles with; thus My Lord has a fine castle, for the greatest Baron in the province should have the finest house; and since pigs were made to be eaten, we eat pork all year round. Consequently, those who say everything is well are uttering mere stupidities; they should say everything is for the best.”

For a while he knelt there on the rug in the library, rocking slightly back and forth with his five senses elsewhere. Have I fallen in love with you? he thought. Am I falling in love? And if I am, what can I do about it? I don’t know how to write letters. I’m doomed. Then, stricken, he whispered: fuck, Rosa, fuck, it’s so unfair, so unfair …

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