Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

  The man ardently delivered his entire, long-in-the-making, carefully prepared argument and fell silent. He was tired. This was perhaps the first time he had shared it with someone, with a stranger in a dark doorway, under bizarre circumstances, and was now embarrassed. Perhaps this was the first time he had doubted it, its validity, its viability in the cold world of other people’s indifference?

  “You’re laughing, aren’t you?” the man spoke up from the nether darkness. “You think I worked it all out down here like a sapient reptile slithering on the ground? Or evolved a new organ for my miserable existence? Or that this is a whole new, my very own, indeed original brand of generosity? No, I’m as selfish as you, as any normal male. (He put a very heavy stress on normal). It’s out of selfishness that I’m telling you all this.”

  “No, you’re not being selfish,” said Melkior without conviction, just to say something.

  “Because I’m not snarling at that business up there? Why, I pine for that business up there with all my supracanine faith in absolute love. I want love, do you understand what I’m saying, love, not gnaw a bone on the ground in this dark doorway!”

  An outcry de profundis. Melkior shuddered. Inside him vibrated muffled affinities with this pathetic ground-bound being who had raised high a huge sky above his head and planted in it a single star in which he had inscribed his destiny. The sky above … and Viviana shining in it. Matter of fact, my dear groundling, our love’s sky is a common or garden skirt at whose zenith twinkles a stubbornly chosen … all right, call it a star … That’s our destiny.

  “You’ll help me upstairs then?” the legless man asked uncertainly.

  Well, what do you know, the man won’t give it up. He wants his cantilena. All right, have it your own way.

  “Of course I will. Come on.”

  “Get hold of me from the back, under the armpits,” the man instructed him briskly, with a kind of joy. He even raised his arms, as if about to take off. Melkior took hold of him like someone teaching a small child to walk and brought him to the staircase. They had just begun to climb, barely clearing the first step or two, when a door upstairs opened and there was the sound of voices. Serious, grave voices.

  “It’s her! Something’s wrong,” the man whispered, terrified. “Run for it, run! As far as you can!” He was hurrying Melkior as if some dreadful anger were threatening.

  “I can’t just leave you on the stairs.”

  “Then dump me behind the door and run!” the man cried in frightful panic. “All’s lost! God, I’m so unhappy!”

  Melkior grabbed him hurriedly and carried him back to the doorway. He set him down piously behind the door like a broken saint, whispered “goodbye” and fled outside.

  But did not go far. Let’s see the violin after all. He positioned himself well, facing a shop window that had a mirror set diagonally in it. He did not have long to wait. Out of the door came an indeed well-built young woman with a very pretty face. But when she stepped onto the pavement Melkior noticed the floating motion of her somehow fetching lameness. With one leg she barely touched the ground in a weightless, fairylike hover; with the other she trod firmly, with all her well-endowed corporeality. As a counterpoint.

  Oh, what an instrument! sighed Melkior. Hence the ardent wish for a virtuoso upstairs. He thought of the luckless torso behind the door. Oh poor church-portal saint, not even Johann Sebastian himself could have played your life in a more charming counterpoint.

  And now, where to? All the roads are blocked by heavy drifts of uncertainty. The thing to do would be to proceed from some starting point under this nocturnal star-riddled dome. Following what star? Every star is the beginning of some motion … Every thought is a star from an undiscovered constellation drowned in the infinity of time. The infinities. The conceptual confidence tricks. The metaphors. The fearful astronomy above the life of a small carnivore rolled up in a ball of yearning under his little sky of a crinoline atop which shines … Viviana. This was his destiny. Stella Viviana. And he set off, following his lost star, to wander vainly in the night.

  Far off in town the cathedral clock tolls the hours. Five o’clock. But night is still strangling the city with damp and cold darkness. The long autumn night. He was freezing in the deserted arbored walk under the tall vaults of withered leaves rustling fearfully on weary trunks. He winced at the roaring of lions. The sound of the zoological tyrant’s voice drew responses from other animals, jerked awake from fearful sleep. The emperor was hungering for their flesh.

  Melkior smelled the stench of the zoo. The warm furs were unrolling, the beasts were stretching, opening their jaws wide, yawning, roaring into the new day. Zoopolis was waking. And broadcasting the stench of its slavery.

  This would be what prisons and barracks stink like. The katorgas. The hordes, legions, cohorts, regiments. The glorious armies that gave epochs their peculiar smells. The large-scale collective fumes, the stenches of history. Stenches Persian, stenches Alexandrine, stenches Hannibalic, stenches Caesarean, stenches Avaran, Hunnish, Tartar, Mongolian, Germanic, stenches Turkish, stenches Napoleonic, stenches Samuraic, stenches Prussian, Franz-Josephinian, Benito-Mussolinian, and stenches Adolf-Hitleran … Stenches and more stenches, as far as history reaches. Mankind has well and truly made a stink of it in troop and bowel movements. Ptui! Melkior spat on the animal stench with which history had invaded his nostrils from the zoo.

  He came out on the long straight road leading back to town. In the distance appeared the lights of an early tram. Here comes Technology, as Maestro would put it. Here comes Power. All right then, let’s see what happens. He was suddenly overcome by a strange thought, a spiteful and terrible thought in fact, it gave him goose bumps all over but he was unable and unwilling to resist it. Let it be. … He stepped down from the pavement onto the track and set off between the rails to meet the tram. Provocatively, irascibly even, with the comic courage of a cartoon hero—a pint-sized intrepid hunter—thumbing its nose at an approaching rhinoceros. The rhinoceros was clanging his way toward him with an angry grumble. Melkior already felt the ground shake under his feet with the approach of the iron beast. Horror gave him a cold lick down his back. Well, let’s see how long we can take it. His imagination began to frighten him with tableaux: limbs torn apart, bowels spilled … Flies. He shooed his imagination away from his dead body and calmly fell to gazing straight ahead. And what’s that?—it’s no longer moving, it’s merely getting larger, more visible. Not approaching at all. The trick is to let the eyes take over. Like in the cinema. That’s the entire secret to this courage. The trick is to regard everything as an image on a screen, to reflect the light from the object to the world-image in my field of vision. And the objects become weak and powerless, under my full control. Symbolic of a world I have created and can banish immediately by closing my eyes. A silent film. He closed his eyes. Fiction. There, the celluloid has snapped, interrupting the projection. But the tram grunted on the uneven rails and the projector came back on in an instant. The addition of sound to the picture alarmed his entire body, exposed in space. This may be the critical moment when the body must be mastered, its fear dispelled by an idea. Well, why shouldn’t my idea, Hold on, be strong enough to bear a courage that is equal to any other great courage? The courage of a captain going down with his ship? A totally useless death. The idée fixe of honor. Which essentially means overcoming one’s fear. Bearing the idea of death—to the death. Spitefully. Stubbornly. But this is where you face a spate of individual variations, mixtures, confusions, with flashes of madness. My idea is mad, too. Hold on. Quite near now. Two hundred meters. If that.

  You can see the driver. Not slowing down. Thinking, The fellow will move off on his own … Sitting there calmly. Not yet upset … Having no idea that what he’s up against is a thought on the rails, one stronger than fear of his hardware. Maestro would congratulate me. The tram. The stupid banal machine. The imagination again: arms severed, legs, skull crushed, a mess of brains and blood, the flesh, the bon
es … The Witnesses Of Horror. He did it on purpose, he meant to kill himself. Nah, he was a nut-case, is all. Drunk. Who is he, anyway? Can you gather anything from his papers? His pockets! Enka’s photo in the wallet. Enka on the beach: an erotic phenomenon! Everything that is feminine and nubile, soft, cuddly, beckoning … He had a flash of desire for the Enka in the photo …

  The driver stepped hard on his bell-pedal. Melkior’s innards quaked inside him. Red alert in the entire body, “attention, danger!” in every cell. His blood shot down from the head into the legs (for they were now more important than the head). At any rate there was nothing left inside the head except: something huge and blue growing ever larger and advancing with a bellow. He closed all his sphincters tight, clamped shut the valves, passages, seams, tensed his will to painful rigidity—he was one superpotent, all-powerful, tearing erection. Come on, you stupid tram! The tram was indeed coming on, stupidly. Well, if that’s what you want … Twenty, ten, five meters! Clanging his bell in panic, appealing to him, pleading with him: step aside, man! Man! All right, you’re clever and I’m stupid, but get out of my way! See how big I am—I’ll crush you!

  You big stupid hulk, my resolve’s greater than you are! I’m not committing suicide, you iron dolt! I’ve put my thought down in front of you, run it over if you can!

  The tram gave a sudden sensible lurch. It let out a fearsome grunt (some dust flew up under its feet) and stopped short as though a huge force had struck it on the snout.

  Ha-ha! leered Melkior in mad triumph upward, at the tram. Which was standing still before him, quiet, tired, sheepish. Defeated. Ha-ha, I’ve stopped you, you mammoth!

  The driver had already dismounted and was swearing his way toward him.

  “Listen, you … Are you off your damned …?” he swung an arm but stopped it in front of his forehead.

  “… rocker? No. Why?” said Melkior in surprise. “I’m no suicide. I’m fine.”

  “Oh, it’s all right to stop a tram like this, eh? What about my timetable? What do you think you’re doing?”

  “All right, carry on then …” muttered Melkior. He now saw revealed the other, banal, city-transport side of the incident.

  “I’ll give you carry on!” and the driver would have assaulted him, but the conductor spoke up with greater objectivity:

  “Leave him alone, will you? Can’t you see he’s a bit …”

  “A bit what? A bit nothing. The silly creep thinks he’s being funny.” The driver was already giving up on the idea of revenge. He was climbing back into the tram. “What about my nerves, damn it?” and he slammed angrily at his bell-pedal and set the car in motion.

  Melkior was taken aback by the unexpected victory. How could I explain it to those tram men? I held my own! Eureka! He was crowing with Archimedean madness. I have discovered the biological law of upthrust! A body immersed in fear will lose as much of its mortality as the weight of the fear displaced. Eureka!

  Noli turbare circulos meos! is what I should have said to the tram’s arrogant captain. Well, it’s too late now. Vivere …

  Vivere senzaa malinconiiaaa … he broke into song hurrying back to town, and the black sky sprinkled him with a fine melancholy rain to make the song all the more absurd.

  Could there be a price out on your head? An underground political conspiracy in a dark cellar dimly lit by an oil lamp. Three unshaven thugs discussing the ways and means of taking your life. Knives stuck into the table, sharp, shiny, with Rostfrei-Solingen inscribed on them. Running down the blades is a groove, like the kind on butcher’s knives. (First chance you get, ask a butcher what the groove on butcher’s knives is for.)

  They will surprise you in a dark street, at night, as you walk by, tapping your fingers absentmindedly on a wall. … But why do they want your head in the first place? For reasons of politics, no less? It’s true, you do have convictions, but they are … well … convictions, nothing more.

  “Look, gentlemen (what kind of gentlemen are these?), am I not allowed to have convictions of my own?” and already you fear that these people know all about your pathetic little convictions, that they have furthermore measured the strength of what you believe in using some sort of special device and that you’re done for. Because the dreams, these dreams that torment you … ! No, you must have been spotted over there, your name must have been mentioned and indeed added to lists, to printed forms.

  He stood with Ugo by the invalid’s weighing machine, waved his hands and insisted: “Mankind, my dear Parampion, mankind!”

  An elegant gentleman in a raincoat who apparently had been waiting until then for his tram approached them and, pointing at Melkior with a pipe he had taken from his pocket, asked with terrible authority:

  “You were shouting Mankind?”

  “No, I said Mankind, my dear brother, quite discreetly for no particular reason. Just like that, for the sake of humanity … and brotherhood.”

  “Humanity? Brotherhood? Are you some sort of internationalist?” “Oh no, not at all! I believe we must defend ourselves, resist as a nation, to the last drop!”

  “Resist?”

  “Yes, take a firm stand, mustn’t we, my friend?”

  But the friend had already made himself scarce, and the gentleman who had been waiting for the tram took Melkior’s arm amicably and took him for a stroll …

  A knife fight, gun play in the dark, dashing to escape, a fall from great heights—this was the program on during a brief morning nap. After Vivere.

  Wielding gleaming butcher’s knives they chase him around the University Library building. He climbs up to the green copper roof and ducks behind one of the four bronze owls, each perched on a book. But they now resort to flinging safety blades at him of all sizes and weights. The gleaming swarms drone and buzz in dense assault formations and swoop down on the bronze owl. They screech and sparkle on the owl’s pate, and the owl has its wings outstretched maternally to shield Melkior the fugitive from the lethal flying blades. Across the roof, behind another owl, appears Ugo’s derisive face: “Give up, ATMAN is in charge. Four Eyes is at HQ. Maestro has committed suicide and Viviana has taken the veil.”

  He looks down, but out of their sockets drop his eyes, and, fraternally connected by a nerve as if holding hands, the two eyes float to the ground like twin soap bubbles, look at each other, each shedding a tear.

  Dissolve to:

  He is sitting on the barrel of a gun. Next to him sits a man-soldier, García (by rank), who speaks none of the known languages. Over there, behind some large crates, are the enemy positions. There is a lull at the front. García takes words out of his tunic pockets and arranges them on the palm of his hand. He then stuffs them into his rifle. He learns languages. Suddenly García is no longer there by the gun. García’s head shouts from the gun barrel: The Maccharones! The Maccharones! And the gun goes off with a frightening report. The words fly about, shouting and screaming: “Murderers!” Gunshots. Words die. Silence. Darkness. The sky is not visible.

  You flee. You walk over dead things and dead men. Helmets, pots, broken lavatory porcelain. You expect a stab in the back at any moment. Merhum Melkior.

  Merhaba! Somebody has caught up with you and prodded you in the back with his finger and your first thought is merhum. … But the skinny, toothless, and generally comical-looking man who has caught up with you immediately asks: “We’re retreating, n’est-ce pas?” Obviously an intellectual.

  “Yes, Professor, a tactical move. García said so. But our side is putting up a damned fine show.”

  “Histrionics?”—and the toothless man smiles with calm contentment.

  In the next sequence the two of you find yourselves in a cramped school lavatory (the teachers’) papered over with old newspapers with pictures of many living kings. There ensues a horrible bellowing, horse hooves, broken glass, a great hullabaloo. Then victorious drums, brass bands, shouts of Mamma! Cara mamma! and Sieg Heil! Finally the song Vento, vento, porta mi via con te …

  The old profes
sor, for all that he appears to be a military person, is unable to control his knees, which knock as though they are carrying an unimaginably heavy load. In the end he sits down on the toilet seat and, having made a stink, sighs, “Oh, my career, my career!”

  “So, Professor, have you any pesetas on you?”

  “Seven hundred … and forty centimos, here. You’re not going to confiscate them, are you?”

  “Yes. To throw them out the window to people downstairs.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then you wipe that career of yours and we run for it!”

  And while the victors downstairs are squabbling over the handful of change, you make your way through a tangle of dark corridors with changing luck and you would certainly have gotten away were you able to run. … But the cannibals are already there, converging on all sides. Surrounded! Trapped! Maestro (for it is he) (as they say in the kind of novel where a character’s identity is held back for a time) is immediately rejected as unfit for human consumption (they cut into him a little, the knife tarnishes—morbus lues, poisonous, says the red-haired Asclepian), and you are thrown into the cauldron for their breakfast. Making a fire under the cauldron (as a slave, of course, with a certain right to be resentful) is Foma Fomich Opiskin, who mutters: “I’m being persecuted. I work for a living!”