Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

  “He’s not shouting out of conviction. He’s shouting to be heard by the boss behind the upholstered door. You can barely be heard behind that door. You’ve really got to raise your voice. After all, it’s that kind of job and that kind of salary. It pays to shout, even against your convictions.”

  “But what’s the reason? Why? Do you know?” Maestro’s obfuscations were irritating him.

  “The reason is Beethoven, of all people.”

  “So?”

  “So … there was a gala production of Fidelio last night and the music guy reviewed it.”

  “Well, what of it? He likes Beethoven!”

  “He likes German music in general.” Maestro followed his broad hint with a grin.

  “And the music guy didn’t praise Beethoven enough?”

  “Oh, he did, he did. But the Old Man yelled at him, ‘What about the chronicler’s duty?’ ‘We’re a political paper’—or rather a ‘paper with a political profile,’ these were his exact words. And it was a gala production, get it? Personalities. He was supposed to mention the personalities in attendance.”

  “Which of course he failed to do?”

  “Yes. The hell with them! Let’s go have a snort of rotgut.”

  “What’s a critic got to do with personalities? That’s something for you, for your City Desk.”

  “Yes, for my Dustbin Desk. We get the rubbish, you get the cream. But it looks like things are changing—now everyone is getting rubbish. The great equalizer. Don’t let it get to you. Sooner or later we’ll all end on the rubbish heap. Such is the march of history. Let’s go have a snort. On me … ‘on the eve of historic times,’ as the boss put it in today’s editorial. Here you are—‘On The Eve Of Historic Times’ …”

  “No, I’ve got to go upstairs!” and he started off with Quixote-like I’ll-show-’em steps, but Maestro held him back using both hands and muttering incomprehensibly.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Did you know that last night Freddie gave Ugo a beating after all? After you left. Lucky thing you did—it was meant for you.”

  “What was meant for me?” said Melkior absentmindedly, looking up at the editorial office windows.

  “What? Come back down to Earth and I’ll tell you what: Freddie’s … got welts. Ugo plastered a few across his physiognomy. Here and there. Gave him a bloody nose. She wiped his blood off with her own little hand and her own little handkerchief. Tenderly. Which cost Ugo a kick, up his Krakatoa, I think.”

  “Krakatoa?” Melkior was laughing.

  “Yes, right up the crater, for the air pressure caused him to mumble ‘Umm,’ rather umbrageously.”

  “And Viviana wiped away his blood?” Melkior was enjoying himself maliciously, avenged by Freddie’s foot.

  “Viviana who?”

  “Er … The beauty.”

  “Her name is not Viviana, it’s …”

  “That’s what I call her,” Melkior hastened to interrupt Maestro. He did not want to first hear her name from this drunk.

  “Viviana—sure—crouches like a Samaritan by his head, and he, the aching wounded gentle knight, grunts and peeps up her skirt, ha-ha. … God, what shapes! I envied him his wounds.”

  “What did Freddie do? Keep out of it?” Melkior was attempting to cover up his loser’s misery by making a show of curiosity. ATMAN was right—Ugo’s next.

  “Keep out, hell! He called her back, tried to drag her away, ‘Leave the ape, let’s go.’ ‘You’re an ape. Get lost!’ And he actually went off with that Lady Macbeth. While She stayed with us—with Ugo, to be precise—and we proceeded to put on The Grand Show. The Fall of the Bastille, no less! We almost tore Thénardier’s ear off in revolutionary ardor. Ugo was great. What am I saying? Magnificent! She kept kissing his lip where it was swollen from Freddie’s blow, and every time she did he put his hand down her dress. Once he even brought the matter out into the open. God, what a Pompeian scene!”

  “Was she drunk?” Melkior was seeking an excuse for her. He remembered Enka. I’ll call her.

  “Drunk, infatuated, the lot. She asked him to take her home. He spent the night.”

  “He did not!” the joyful truth flew out of Melkior, chirping like a bird.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. And another thing, I think very little of it is true. Ugo slept at home last night. I saw him.”

  “Yes, well, whether you saw him or not, don’t be jealous, my dear Eustachius. Your turn will come. Mine won’t. Fate has made me the gift of The Great Solitude. A large cloak in which I don’t even have a flea for company. The hermit. Leone Eremita. The purist. Vox clamantis. Leopold by name, called Poldy. Even Polda, by the closer among my drunkard friends. And thus we arrive at the stable of the mammal Thénardier. Let us take a seat, Eustachius old son. Mammal Thénardier, two shots, shot to shot. As for the rest, let’s leave it to technology. To the various telegraph wires and high voltage. Known under the important name of cables. Especially electrical cables!” Maestro gave a derisive laugh. “What do you think, Eustachius, is there a telegraph line between the Vatican and the Kremlin? A secret line. Underground. Collusions, eh? If I could manage to dig it out somewhere, what a message I’d have, for them both! From the Carpathians.”

  “Why the Carpathians, of all places?” But Melkior was thinking of Enka, defiantly, I’ll ring her just to spite the bitch …

  “The word is historical. Also, the Carpathians are halfway between. I looked them up on the map. But it was the word itself that took my fancy to begin with. ‘This is Leone Eremita, speaking from the Carpathians with the following message for the Vatican and the Kremlin,’ eh? Then I would snap the wire in half and tie a cat to each end and let them yowl in the bastards’ ears! Animal Thénar-dier, two shots, shot to shot.” Then he whispered to Melkior, confidentially, like someone revealing a secret, “This Thénardier fellow is a new species of mammal, they don’t study him in school, but they will. By the way, look how we stretched his left ear for him last night. You can tell the difference at a glance. Did you measure it, Thénardier? It’s as red as a ship’s portside light. For nighttime navigation.”

  “Well, you got one across the snout, too.” Thénardier parried with a nervous grimace.

  “The Batrachomyomachy. God, how we croaked!”

  The sodden, slimy cigarette in his mouth had gone out. He sucked at it in vain. No go.

  “Thénardier! Match!”

  “At your service, dreaded Pharaoh!” and he lit Maestro’s cigarette with a chamberlain’s submissive gesture. A ritual.

  “After ‘Pharaoh’ say, ‘life—health—power,’ you beast! It’s what people said to pharaohs, ‘onkhu—uza —sonbu.’ That’s ancient Egyptian,” he explained to Melkior. “And now begone!” Maestro dismissed Thénardier with a pharaonic gesture.

  “Ancient Egyptian! Not surprised, Eustachius? Think I faked it?”

  “No, I really wonder how …”

  “I used to study it,” Maestro announced boastfully and poured some brandy down his gullet. Opening the gap-toothed mouth, cooling the heated gorge. “They had social poetry, too. The ancient Egyptians, long before the Kharkov school! ‘I saw a smith toiling with hammer at his forge by the fire; his fingers like a crocodile’s, filthy as fish from the Nile.’ Then there’s the one about the cobbler: ‘The cobbler, a wretched fellow, is in truly poor condition,—if he didn’t gnaw his leather he would die of malnutrition.’ I am quoting from memory, in rough translation. And the machinists today, they think they invented everything. The cult of the machine! The pre-posterousness of it! The petrol-fumed inspiration! Their Pegasus a Ford, their Muse, Miss Sonja Henie, the most ridiculous nose in the world! What poetry was ever conceived in an automobile or on-board an aeroplane, that’s what I’d like to know! The mollycoddling of one’s behind! Where were the power shovel and the bulldozer when Cheops was erecting his pyramid, when Pericles was building the Acropolis? When Socrates was making fools of people all over Athens? Tell me, am I oversta
ting it?”

  “Not at all. Only—”

  “All right, say it: Progress! Well, Progress is welcome to pass me by. I’m staying put! Let it rush, let it fly! I, a common biped, walk on my two legs, pleased to feel the Earth beneath my feet, happy to be treading on it, treading on it, treading on it!” and he fell to pounding the floor with his feet, enraged, even hateful, “the damned old bitch that birthed me only to swallow me up again! Using my material to make a pig, a hedgehog, or simply a head of lettuce to be eaten by an overweight woman on a diet. It’s enough to drive you mad! While they fly, they flutter, they are in such a rush. To reach where? Whereto, engineers, locksmiths, mechanics, drivers?”

  Maestro spread his arms wide, asking his question around the empty bar room in a kind of despair.

  Thénardier, arranging bottles along his altar aided by his two ministrants, tittered hee-hee-hee, savoring his morning fun with pleasure.

  “Let’s have the poison, you bloody sophist! And stop smirking! Margaritas ante porcos,” he communicated to Melkior, shaking his head resignedly. “It was the likes of him who gave the hemlock to Socrates. And what will they give me? The juice. Electricity. Ho, ho, ho,” Maestro launched into a fit of mad, frenetic laughter. “Power transmission line … ho, ho, ho … at high voltage … ho, ho, ho. Oh yes, at high voltage, right enough. Attention! Mortal danger! And on the pylons, ever see it? They’ve painted the old skull and crossbones, as on a bottle of poison. As at a chemist’s: I would like a pylonful of high voltage please. I have a mind to kill, ho, ho, ho …”

  “Nevertheless, mankind has greatly benefited from electricity,” said Melkior mechanically, just to assert his presence. So she did let Ugo … He may have been going home to sleep afterward. He was late going back, he had been with her.

  “Mankind? What mankind?” Maestro was aroused in earnest. “There are lots of different mankinds. Were not the ancient Greeks mankind? In what way did Aristotle suffer by having no electricity? He did know about rubbing amber, but he held that in utter contempt. Rubbing indeed. He had more important things to think about than rubbing. Would Dante have written better poetry under a frosted-glass bulb? If Leonardo had needed any electricity he certainly would have set some wheels spinning to get the sparks flying. He built all kinds of machinery, his designs have survived, he’d have found it a cinch to … And yet he painted that perfidious smiling femina, heh-heh … Smiling there, the little beast of a female … I have her back at home, a first-class reproduction, you’ll see it when you come by. Ah, you’ve never been to my place, now have you? You’ve definitely got to come by one day … What am I saying, one day? You’ve simply got to come for a bit of peaceful conversation. It’s essential. Only I think you ought to know I have no electricity. High voltage runs outside past my house, a long-distance trans-mis-sion line even, right under my window, with the old oil lamp guttering inside! Ha-ha, how do you like that? I ignore the terrible force coursing past. Be on your way, you potent nonsense, and leave me be, I have no use for you!”

  “So, Maestro, do you hate all forms of energy or just electricity?” Maestro seemed to have sensed the irony in the question: he gave Melkior a suspicious look with one eye—the other being filled with a smoke-induced tear—and replied disdainfully:

  “I hate nothing. I merely reject the superfluous.”

  “And yet you use the electric tram!”

  “Never!” flared Maestro, hurt. “I walk a full hour to the office. I walk and think. After all, human thought came into being on the foot. The ancient Greeks thought in the street. The peripatetics walked. As people talk, so they walk—that’s my theory, if you don’t find it off-putting. Let the linguists and … whatever those experts are called, hang themselves if they haven’t perceived such a glaring fact. What is speech if not thought? The man whose clogs sink into mud with his every step speaks differently from a man who walks on blacktop. The highlander’s words are as hard as the stone he treads on. Fast walkers are fast speakers; those who drag their feet drag their words as well. The quantities of certain lowlands, the accents of hard, uneven surfaces. Speech has all the relief of the ground underfoot, the tempo of motion in space. The rhythm and the melody of walking. People walk in major or minor key. That’s how they speak, too: brightly or glumly.”

  “What about you? Do you walk in major or minor?”

  “Minor. Some speeches are gloomy even if they’re about a cheerful subject. I know how I speak. If it were written down you would call it banter. But you’ve got to hear me say it. Which is why I prefer speech to writing. Oral literature.”

  “You are a speaker. That, too, is an art form.”

  “Because I’m an infantryman. Not in the military sense, of course. Professional soldiers march even as they speak. As for military commands, are they still human speech? You haven’t done your National Service yet, have you? A command consists, my dear sir, of two parts: the preparatory and the executive. Such as ‘Forwarrr … dmarch!’ ‘Dmarch!’ is the executive part. And what is ‘dmarch’? Eh? ‘Forwarrr’ is supposed to stir a special spirit in your bottom; next, ‘dmarch’ gives each soldier a kick in the backside as an initial impulse for getting a move on. Your illustrious behind will go through it in the fullness of time and you’ll remember me then, if for no other reason.”

  “Octopus, polyp, cephalopod, vacuum cleaner,” he went on in a kind tone to address Thénardier, who was doing some accounts at the bar, scratching his pelican chin worriedly with a pencil.

  “Yes, philosopher Ugly Nose?” responded Thénardier without raising his head from his accounts.

  “Listen, you headless cod, raise what you haven’t got when speaking to me. Serve your customers. Shot to shot …”

  “No, Maestro. That’s enough for me,” parried Melkior. He had long resolved to get up and was only waiting for a convenient break to flee from Maestro’s thrall. He had to find a phone now, he had to ring Enka. She knows I’m going to ring her. She’s waiting.

  “Eustachius the Kind, drop them,” said Maestro all of a sudden, sounding conspiratorial. “You are a man apart.”

  “Drop whom?” Melkior pulled free of Enka’s close embrace.

  “Them. Ugo and the others. Superficial cads, clowns.” And he went on in a whisper, “As for her, she’ll come crawling to you. She’ll be asking you to mount her, she’ll get down humbly like a hen. I know her. Be a rooster. Head high. Proud.”

  “She doesn’t interest me, Maestro. What makes you think I’d …?”

  “Come off it, Eustachius! You are consumed by vanity. You keep making comparisons: ‘what’s Ugo got that I …’ And she is beautiful.”

  “Yes, so she is. But I don’t care whose she may be.”

  “You’re lying, Eustachius, but that doesn’t matter. The hell with her. We could find a better place to talk, you and I, somewhere quiet. We are people who still have something to say. What else have we got left but to talk to each other? Setting our thoughts flowing from one head to another, as it were, letting our minds fertilize each other …”

  Maestro’s voice quavered with an odd tenderness over the last few words. Melkior did not dare look at his face: it was bound to have on it that humbly pleading look, the painful expression of unrestrained, miserable sincerity as the very words melt in the throat with the pleasure of abasement.

  “Don’t frown. Forgive me, Eustachius,” Maestro all but sobbed. “Did I touch some soft spot of yours? Never mind. I can risk it. I no longer have anything to lose—I no longer have anything. Even this body’s not mine—I’ve sold my cadaver to the Faculty of Medicine. And drank up the proceeds long ago. I’m a man who has consumed his own dead body—I cannot be bothered by the fine points.”

  Then suddenly, as though he had been set aglow by an idea, his eyes took on a weird gleam and a smile—superior, triumphant—spread over his face. There appeared spiteful glee.

  “Incidentally, the kind of death that mine will be has not been experienced by anyone, ever! Did you notice my choice
of words, Eustachius, ‘to experience death’? Ha-ha, nobody can honestly say, ‘I have experienced death.’ Danton noticed it on the eve of being executed: you can’t say, ‘I was guillotined.’ But forget the guillotine —it’s so ordinary.”

  Maestro fell silent and seemed to be musing about something.

  “I chose my death long ago, before I sold myself to the Institute of Anatomy. (‘Sold myself’ sounds a bit prostitutional, don’t you think?) That was precisely why I sold myself: because I had chosen. What a death, Eustachius, my boy!” He was waxing ecstatic. “Nobody has ever died that way! So appropriately! So ironically triumphant. Symbolic! So complete!”

  “Don’t talk nonsense, Maestro,” Melkior was anxious. “You’re not thinking of killing yourself, are you?”

  “Kill myself, he says … Don’t drag me through the mud, Eustachius!” Maestro was seriously offended. “Killing oneself is for abandoned pregnant dames and spotty boys crossed in love. Also, you need equipment to kill yourself. I despise it. Maiming your body is undignified and hideous! And that’s precisely what all the suicides do: they shoot themselves in the head, slash their wrists, throats, bellies, drive knives into their hearts (even nails into their brains!), destroy internal organs using all manner of poisonous slops, drown themselves, fling their bodies from great heights, have them mangled and massacred under the wheels of an engine … Horrifying and disgusting. The vicious criminals! The perverted scum! If they didn’t do it themselves it would be necessary to put them to death for it. And rid life of those damned slaughterers and lunatics.

  “No, Eustachius,” Maestro went on in a sentimental tone, “my death is going to be brand-new, medicinally pure, so to speak. No blood, no shit. You’ll see. Only I must start urinating more. Urinating harder, that is. I must switch to beer—it promotes micturition. I must begin exercising right away, ha-ha … Don’t ask questions, Eustachius the Merciful. One day this will all make sense.”

  It’s revolting all the same, your medicinal purity, thought Melkior, getting up. He was disgusted by poor Maestro. Unless the man was merely dramatizing some rotten affair of his in which he would like to play a major role? A hoax. He had very nearly fallen for it. Or was it all an exercise in purposely fouling some very intimate purity? No telling what all you can find in a dustbin.