Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

  “You know what, gentlemen? They’ve taken us out to pasture!” “Ah, the penny’s dropped at last!” mutters the doctor with a pitying smirk.

  “They’re fattening us!” the first-threatened agent nearly sobs out in horror.

  “That’s right, gentlemen,” the chief engineer states ashamedly, “fattening us like pigs.”

  Now there ensues a painful awakening in the caring embrace of Mother Nature. The babies immediately release the generous breast. They feel the swellings in their bellies, they feel a dreadful animal slithering and squelching over the mishmash of sweet fruits inside. As if they had been eating live salamanders, rats, crocodiles, their innards rebel at the prospect of sudden catastrophe. Each hugs a tree trunk in an all-out effort to throw up and out their sneakingly greedy and disgusting death.

  A disgusting death. A disgusting death you carry about inside you, as you do the image of your home country, the old homestead. My heart’s in the highlands. From across the seas I’ll come back to thee. And the soul parts from the body. Going hence. But before leaving it dictates the dispositions to be made as hereunder specified: one half of my assets to be left to my legitimate issue, the other half accruing to my lawfully wedded wife to own and manage as she shall see fit for the rest of her natural born life, should she not marry again. In the event of her remarriage, her inheritance shall pass on to my legitimate issue, or my grandchildren if any, upon their coming of age. My widow shall in such a case retain only her personal belongings from her so-called dowry, should any remain. Item, two dresses, one for everyday wear and the other for formal occasions; item, two changes of underwear, to wit, two slips, two pairs of panties, two brassieres, and two suspender belts, one change being white and the other black (for possible mourning). Items, two pairs of shoes, one of low quality and the other of high quality, the latter to be black for the reason set out hereinabove. Her jewelry shall be sequestered in full, including her wedding ring which through her remarriage will have lost its sacramental value and become an item of personal adornment. Further, there shall be deducted from the estate an appropriate sum of money, at rates currently obtaining, for a Class A funeral (not including a requiem) for my widow. There shall be carried in her funeral procession a wreath of thorns and nettles with a yellow ribbon bearing the inscription COME TO ME, DARLING. My widow shall be buried in a grave separate from mine, with the following inscription to be carved on the headstone: HERE LIES THE WOMAN OF MY LIFE TO THE DEATH. HER LATE HUSBAND #1. While the coffin is being nailed shut there shall—Knock knock knock—violent pounding at the door interrupted The Great Will and Testament. Before he had time to ask who it was, Ugo’s leering face appeared in the room.

  “Verily, verily, I say unto thee,” and in three steps he reached the sofa on which Melkior was lying. “What you’re doing to yourself God Himself cannot understand. Been lying long like this? Woolgathering, I gather?”

  “Yes, well, I’ve been doing a bit of thinking,” replied Melkior stretching himself as if freshly awake.

  “Thinking? Well, I, too, despise the body, Eustachius the Most Kind. ‘But God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honor to that member which lacked.’ Saint Paul. I’ve been feeling spiritual all over today. We had a clergyman to lunch, a certain Dom Kuzma. My mother has the habit of picking up such characters in churches and bringing them home. And he’s all spirit, hardly any body left at all.”

  “With, er, big ears?” Melkior propped himself on an elbow in keen interest.

  “Rather like an ex-elephant. You know him?”

  “Ahh, poor Dom Kuzma.” Melkior could see him on the invalid’s machine, miserable, quarrelsome, haggling for each gram of flesh. “We sucked a lot of blood out of him in our boyhood. He was our catechism instructor. But then he had a lot of blood in those days—fierce blood, too.”

  “You should see him now! Dies irae. One of those who come before God’s wrathful countenance. Mother kept going out to the kitchen so as not to cry in front of him. Even Kalisto’s worm-eaten heart gave a lurch. He vowed, deep inside, to stop seeing Deaf Daisy for a week. But he’ll go to her tomorrow, naturally. He hasn’t got the least shred of bodily shame, that fundamental paternal virtue.”

  “Of such a son,” added Melkior.

  “Why do you believe me so incapable of spiritual elevation? The unholy spirit that proceeds from the father …”

  “… proceeds also from the son. Filioque. The theologico-sexual problem of every family. That is what the East split from the West over. It preferred to rely on the father, the more experienced of the two. The sexual spirit is the accidental progenitor of the son, the punished libertine paying dearly for his tiny short-lived happiness. The son is his damnation. His conscious sex incarnate, always underfoot when the desire is upon him. A waking ear in carnal nights, a suspicious eye preying on his lust with unjust and cruel disgust. Woe to the parent, having to be ashamed of his own virility because his male descendant has castrated him in his fantasy.”

  “My view of the issue is more on the financial side. Kalisto’s virility is a strain on the family budget.”

  “Ah, you would like him to have that little item subsidize your virility instead? Because your virility is entitled to financial aid arising from his shameful renouncement? Entitled to your father’s sacrifice? But why? What’s your honorable Johnson done to deserve more joy than his? Perhaps your father’s panicking at the thought of his last twitches? No joy, no poetry, just a poignant overhaul?”

  “Don’t, don’t. You’ll have me weeping in a minute!” Ugo made a comically tearful face. “I’ll dream about Kalisto in flagrante with Deaf Daisy and cheer him on to beat the band.”

  “And so you should, were you more of an independent male specimen and less of Daddy’s stupid spermatozoon who’d happened upon the notion of the immaculate conception.”

  “You are hell-bent, aren’t you, on depriving me of my little revenue stream. If this transpires, I’m done for. Without sin I cannot peddle indulgences. Mind you, Kalisto is a good-sized sinner as sinners go, and I can tell you he gets off cheap with me. Let him just try his luck in church—they’d give him something to remember. He’d get his sinful knees good and callused like a dromedary’s. Not to mention the repentance, the vows, the useful Never Again decisions … Whereas I allow ongoing sinning—for a modest consideration, of course. And yet you tell me I have no understanding? I’m kindhearted, I really am. And how does he treat his legitimate ‘spermatozoon’? Makes him sell old hats, that’s how! I have to go off to a date like a consumptive romanticist, with poems in my pockets—I’m too broke to take a girl to a Café. I owe money to waiters all over town. Thénardier will sport my guts for suspenders. With all the damp in the parks, I’ll catch my death one of these days. But God sees my misery—He’s sent us a warm autumn. Ahh!” sighed Ugo in dead earnest. “And I’ve got this rhyme business to worry about! You can’t get to first base with blank verse. They look right through you like cows and carry on with their own train of thought: two yards of fabric will do for a close-fitting dress, but you need more for a pleated skirt. Plus a matching striped silk blouse (black and yellow), yes, that would do nicely. … No, rhymes are an absolute must. The only thing they understand; June-moon. The old tune. It gets their attention. They swoon. My goodness, the way those words go with each other, isn’t this marvelous?” he imitated a marveling dumb blonde.

  Melkior was chuckling on the sofa. “Well then, my dear Parampion, all you have to do is write rhyming verse.”

  “Aah, don’t laugh at the pragmatic poet, Eustachius the All-Wise. Why not help me instead, you’re a ready hand at making those treats which our birds peck at so readily. Listen to this:

  The old hope has died the death

  Restless is the autumn air

  October …

  and here I need something to happen in her hair, but I haven’t got anything to rhyme with the death in the first line. October’s gentle … breath/Ruffles your hair. But
it doesn’t quite click, don’t you agree, Eustachius the Gentle?”

  “Yes, you’ve upset the meter in the last two lines,” said Melkior. “They need to be heptasyllabic like the first two. Perhaps you’d better put And October’s gentle breath/Permeates your golden hair.”

  Ugo gave him a delighted kiss. “God, what talent! The way you come right out with it, off the cuff!”

  U-go and chew bricks, simpleton. Then it came to him in a flash: it’s for Viviana! He’s got a date with her tonight after all! And October’s gentle breath permeates your golden hair. She’ll ask him to write it down in her album, permeates your golden hair. What’s per-mee-ate, pet? I bet it’s something risqué. Just like you! “You could have thought of something finer for her,” he said, with a mouth on which the smile had dried.

  “What, isn’t it all right now?” Ugo was anxious. “Well, you are cruel! Telling me to put gentle breath! You conned me, Eustachius, didn’t you? Of course you did, it’s so pedestrian: death/breath. Vacuous. Just like you.”

  “Don’t worry, she’ll love it. Ah-ha, she’ll say, I’ve made poetry! If she’s heard of Laura, you’re Petrarch.”

  “Wait a minute, Eustachius the Suspicious!” gaped Ugo in mock surprise, showing his large fillings, “who do you think I’m writing this for? You who keep boasting, ‘I know him—I’m a judge of character.’ Oh no, you don’t know me at all. Today’s my fiancée’s birthday and I can’t afford a gift—I’m broke. I’m giving her a poem instead—a sonnet, if you wish to humiliate me to the fullest!”

  “The old hope has died the death is your fiancée, and the gentle breath is in Viviana’s hair,” said Melkior, and he got up restlessly.

  “Oh what a libidologist you are, Eustachius the Unerring!”

  “Is this an admission then?”

  “Yes.” Ugo dropped his eyes like a young sinning girl. “But … but it’s all innocent, pure, like being at First Communion. On an ideal plane. That’s the whole point. Poor fiancée.”

  Melkior had seen her with him now and again in the evening hours, the time set aside for her. The Café, Gita’s, mainly a student hangout, fruit salad and coffee, very cheap. Or the cinema, Nelson Eddy and Jeannette MacDonald. Rose Marie. Touching. She liked a good cry at the film. A super film. His senior by at least four or five years, fashion dressmaker, skinny, long thin legs, square-hips-flat-behind, breasts gathered into two modest handfuls underneath a virginal blouse, mole on chin with three resilient hairs growing from it. Three palm trees on Happiness Island. She was not fond of Melkior. She did like having a romp, though, in his room with her fiancé.

  But the fiancé was getting acute attacks of other loves. Fellow undergraduate, co-ed Cica, springtime, walks, sonnets. The old hope has died the death. He would park his fiancée for the night (a bit of student slang, that) as early as nine o’clock and go on to make a night of it with Cica. Hey, why didn’t the fiancée fall in love with someone else, too? Idea for breakup, it’s all your fault, to think I trusted you so blindly, you sly minx. Worse. He took her to the zoo. Animals mate in springtime, women love to watch, it excites them. In front of the monkey cage—he told Melkior so himself—at the exact moment of simian joy. A young man was standing on the other side of her, watching edgily. Her face changed colors, jealousy. Let’s move on, pet. Her voice was uneven, as if she had been running hard. He kept giving her little nudges toward the young man hoping the man would see her, that she would see him, that there would flare up between them a great, irresistible love, monkey-inspired, leaving him free with Cica, in vernal sonnets. A mad hope, a futile one. That hope, too, died the death. The young man, taken onanis-tically unawares, walked off. Sorry, ma’am. She gave him a parting look after all (or so it seemed to him) in that way, the monkey way. Something must have sparked. And he was jealous. And he quarreled with her. You’re just a she-ape in rut! You’re now ready to do it with anyone. And she cried. I love you. He then stroked her thinning hair and took her to the woods behind the zoo and they romped like monkeys.

  “If it’s so pure, you could have written something better for her.” Melkior was pacing the room with a vengeful grin. Inside him flourished a sadness in the temperate climate of small despair. A mood of mild poisoning. Fatigue. Yawning. Humor.

  “I’m sure you could have!” retorted Ugo in angry frustration. “There was no time, for one thing. I was waiting there to collect the whoring tax from Kalisto after lunch, but that man Dom … your catechism instructor … went on and on about his red corpuscles. There was no end to it. Mother shed a tear for each corpuscle, and Kalisto went pale with fear—white corpuscles all over the place. It was all I could do to lure him away and into my room for a somewhat more spirited tête-à-tête. I cited you as witness to his movements around the post office this morning. Well, what do you care—he can’t stand you anyway. But it worked, I can tell you that. I also mentioned buying a birthday present for the fiancée. I’m short of cash, he said, I’ve put money down in advance for coal. Not to mention where she (the fiancée, that is) seems to have birthdays more than once a year. Oh, my son, my son, when are you going to stand on your own two feet? Oh, Daddy, Daddy, I’ve been standing on my own two feet in front of you for at least half an hour. Oh, my son, you’re good for nothing. Oh, Daddy, you’re good for everything. Following the exchange of diplomatic notes we proceeded to implement a reparation treaty. And, lo and behold, Kalisto coughed up a shiny Protect Yugoslavia.” Ugo flipped a silver fifty-dinar piece and caught it in his palm. “Alley oop!”

  “Enough for a high-style Give’nTake session tonight, I expect.”

  “Not at all. It’s Give’n Make tonight, as a matter of fact,” said Ugo triumphantly. “A quiet place with well-behaved waiters. There’ll have to be poetry whispered into a shell-like ear. If only there could be a bit of Petrarch, dolci ire, dolci sdegni et dolci paci. October’s gentle breath, oh, quelle différence! Apart from permeates, it’s all at a Kalisto love level. Wouldn’t you happen, Eustachius the Generous, to have among your remaindered stock a line or two to spare? Spare Christian, Oh Cyrano the great, a spark of your wit so that with Roxanne he can be a big hit!”

  “I haven’t got any, poor Christian, the mind’s gone dry, my dear. Not that it could help you, with your mouth from ear to ear.”

  “And the fillings, don’t forget, stomp me right into the ground, kind Eustachius, why don’t you. Is that the way to speak to a man all atremble before a date with his beloved? With nothing in his pocket but your October!”

  “All right then, toss it.” Melkior flung himself on the sofa back-first. The springs let out a painful sob.

  “Toss it? And recite what instead? Damned Brumaire? Where’s that one with Little one, I am but a painted clown? Remember? You penned it for Mina. That time you nearly got crowned with a siphon bottle for your pains. Be honest—who was it who saved you? That’s the one I need. It would suit me for other reasons, too; I mean suit my mood and my state of mind in general.”

  “God knows where it might beee …” Melkior yawned fit to bring on tears. He was painfully hungry.

  “Well, what do you know, I’m a bore. You’re yawning. Don’t be a beast, Eustachius, lend us the poem.”

  “I told you I don’t know where it is, didn’t I?” and all the while he was thinking, Where else could it be? In the yellow folder along with Mina’s only letter, the one saying she was going back to her fiancé, farewell. Fare thee well Mina. Eyes like yours I shall never again … Give him that to conquer Viviana with? Farewell my love. The sun goes slowly down, Preparing my vigil in the endless night, My bittersweet dreams and my thorned crown. May your tomorrow be bracing and bright, While I …

  “Well, recite it for me then, Eustachius the Most Lovable—I’ll take it down. I still have time to learn it by heart.”

  “I’ve forgotten it. What will it matter if some day I drown in drunken jeers my sorrowful plight? Little one, I am but a painted clown …”

  “Oh God, don’t tell me you can’
t remember a single stanza? Eustachius the Sharp-Eyed, just one little stanza, please …” Ugo knelt by the sofa and kissed Melkior on the temple.

  “I’ll be going now. You close the flower, I remember that much.”

  “Go on, go on.”

  “When the sun sets I think it was. Or not. I don’t know. I really cannot remember another word. Your kiss was in vain.”

  “Well, what about that bit?”

  “What bit?”

  “Your kiss was in vain.”

  “That bit meant Go to hell!” Melkior got up. He was now afraid that Ugo might remember those artless lines for Mina. He could not bear to hear them from Ugo’s lips.

  “I’ll be going now. You close the flower,” Ugo was reciting in a soulful whisper.

  “Suits me. Be on your way.”

  “But it’s useless, Eustachius the Mindless. What can I do with it? When the sun sets … What am I to do?”

  “Have a pee and off to bed. And when the sun rises again there’ll be a war on! War! Understand me, Parampion the Cretinous? War!” he shouted in irritation. Hunger was developing in him a beastly instinct to roar. He felt his entire miserable harassed body present in his mindless voice.

  “Fine, Eustachius the Terrible, fine. Forget the poem. I’m off to fight the dragon empty-handed like that biblical hero … I forget which.” Ugo was put off by the shouting. But when Melkior lit a cigarette he took one out himself and asked for a light. Melkior’s hand trembled as he lit it for him. In the match light he saw an ill-shaven face, thick lecherous lips, gaping equine nostrils, and that forehead, low, idiotic, half overgrown with an almost straight band of thick black eyebrows—an ape. That was the conclusion in which his rage was being dissolved, to flow away calmly, even with a smile.