“So he who matters must not be good?”
“He shouldn’t … that is, he can’t. He’s responsible. He must build up his malice inside himself lest he begin believing in goodness. He must doubt. This means he must look out, watch, listen (even eavesdrop), catch words, turn them this way and that to discover their secret meaning, the menacing and dangerous idea. He will thus determine his own thinking, his attitude, his course of action. If I know there’s a scoundrel who intends to set fire to my home (and there actually is such a scoundrel), I won’t just sit by the fireside reciting ‘To be or not to be’ with tears in my eyes. I won’t sit there believing that he might not set fire to it after all … won’t wait to become a tragic character. You can be sure that I will load my rifle and sit in wait behind my window to pick the scoundrel off before he sets my home ablaze.”
“But what if the scoundrel says to himself: if I don’t torch the scoundrel’s house he’ll torch mine?”
“Never mind what the scoundrel thinks (I know anyway), the point is what he does. The point is that I must be stronger than he is, or at least more deft.”
“So if I’ve got it right, ‘preventive dehumanization’ means ruling out the possibility of there being any goodness at all, it is the theoretical destruction of goodness?”
“Yes—temporarily destroying it, until conditions arise for it to exist in a genuine sense. Being good in this world is naïve and stupid. Anyhow it is a false goodness and consequently a false tragedy. We don’t need tragedy to discover the dreadful truth. Indeed tragedy cloaks truth with the charm of art, it seduces us into enjoyment by lifting its soiled theatrical skirt coquettishly before us and showing the seamy sides of life with a fetching grin. Not even death itself is serious here. Nothing is serious, all is simply beautiful and desirable. But I want to see the truth naked, without its tragic rags. Because I know that underneath those rags lies something else tragic, a profound and genuine and terrible tragedy, one that no Racine or Shakespeare can help me with. I’m no Hamlet, I know straight from the start that my uncle means to murder my father and marry my mother, so in order to prevent it …”
“You kill him?”
“Of course, if only in theory.”
“But how can you be sure that your uncle’s going to murder?”
“How? Let’s reply with a question: why shouldn’t he murder—what’s to stop him? Why shouldn’t he, if it will get him all the pleasures he has dreamed of his whole life? You of course would not commit murder, but don’t reason in terms of yourself. Our mistake and … our irreparable oversight is precisely that—reasoning in terms of ourselves. Which the scoundrel counts on—that we’ll reason in terms of ourselves, that we won’t smell a rat. But we should reason on his terms; that is why I say we ought to watch with doubt and distrust, we ought to know beforehand. But we’re too deeply caught up with ourselves, we explore our weaknesses, believing ourselves to be some brand of terrible sinner. Meanwhile he prepares, he plots eluding notice, in perfect safety. It’s too late afterward to smack your forehead: oh if only I had known, if only I’d had an inkling! Why is it that I never saw it, never thought, never paid attention before this? Too late—the deed is done. And now we ought to take our revenge, but we’re not up to it. So we reflect: what’s the use, what is the point of revenge when our father’s gone and our mother’s sharing the murderer’s bed? We reason. ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.’ We anguish. Which is exactly what the evil uncle wants—our anguish, our physical inaction; it spells safety for him. We make tragedies for people to weep, but he chortles and enjoys being used for the making of art. Art does kill him in the tragedy (or not, as the case may be), but it kills him in an artistic, symbolic way—and he doesn’t give a fig for its symbols when he knows he’s alive. And exults in being alive. He even enjoys the symbols, in which he sees someone else rather than himself, so that he will actually shed a tear over that Someone Else’s fate, for the pleasure. Oh, we pay the scoundrel a tremendous tribute in tragedies! And in real life we leave him alone to savor his criminal plunder. We also leave him his life, which is not only undeserved but actually a threat to other lives. The scoundrel ought to be gotten rid of in time. Physically and simply, not symbolically; without ceremony and catharsis and tragi-pathos mumbo jumbo à la Aristotle.”
“So we should kill preventively so as not to be killed?” concluded Melkior with a smile freezing on his lips. “But kill whom? By what criterion?”
“By a simple criterion, medical. There are symptoms. How does a surgeon know where to cut? Does he need a criterion? He simply pins down where the illness is hidden and what it is that is endangering the organism. This is largely a matter of talent, knowledge, intuition—but very often of simple cunning. The killer is lying in wait and the thing to do is provoke him. You’ve got to tease him out of the armor of his quiescence, to prod his murderous wishes awake. You will of course have observed such a character on the tram: sitting there with his legs stretched across the aisle, blocking the passage of others, everything there is his. Not that he does this purposely—he just feels like it. He doesn’t think of his legs as an obstacle, for people to step over, around, grumbling at having to adapt to him. So you trod on his foot on purpose. Step on it good and hard, with all your weight! But you apologize right away, awfully sorry, didn’t mean to, an accident, and so on … and then look at his face, look into his eyes: if you know how to look you’ll discover a murderer. What a pleasure it would be for him to kill you, given half the chance! There’s your ‘criterion’ for you!”
Don Fernando fell silent, wearing a sort of quiet sadness on his face, like someone who has had a good cry.
“Wait a minute,” said Melkior without irony, indeed with concern, “who could possibly catch them all?”
“You’re talking like a policeman!” frowned Don Fernando. “Then again, why not? That’s what the job should be of any intelligent police force which genuinely protects people’s safety—to catch murderers before they’ve committed the crime, instead of producing detective stories after the murder and inventing police geniuses and criminal heroes to tickle the fancy of small-time delinquents and romantic onanists.”
“So what you’re saying is … tread on people’s feet in trams and then peer into their eyes? But isn’t that a rather unreliable method, telling potential criminals by their eyes? There used to be this thing about low foreheads and beetle brows and skull shape … the so-called Lombrosian type …”
“There’s something in that, too. But a man with a nasty look in his eyes is undoubtedly a potential murderer,” said Don Fernando with certainty. “Just give him a chance, take a bit of a risk. Step on his foot—not literally, of course, not on a tram—I mean in a metaphorical sense … Incidentally, there’s a way that is more reliable still. You mentioned low foreheads and beetle brows … and I say: whoever’s been physically marked by Nature in any way ought to be put under surveillance. All those ill-matched arms, uneven legs, floppy ears, enormous noses (puny ones as well, mind), hunched backs, squinting eyes, and particularly—and I say particularly—anyone under five foot five. I can well understand the suffering of midgets and I believe it was one of them who invented crime. Just look at them in their platform shoes, their craning necks, their broadly inclusive sweeping gestures, settling issues in a ‘manly’ way; even their voices sound stentorian and heroic. But that’s not enough. They’re after other deeds, the real, acknowledged kind, the ones that inspire fear and awe. They aspire to greatness rather than to being normal; they would rule us, whatever the cost. They gave us Napoleon and, so it seems, Caesar the epileptic, too. Therefore beware the marked, particularly the diminutive. They are haters and will stop at nothing.”
“You’d end up with a large chunk of mankind ‘under surveillance,’” remarked Melkior acidly. “But who would be doing the job? By what right?”
“By the right of the majority …” said Don Fernando vaguely, as if he himself didn’t entirely believe this.
r /> “But what makes you think the majority of people look ‘nice’?”
“History, that’s what!” Don Fernando sprang back to life, fortified by a fresh idea. “Every historical blackguard eventually paid his debt to mankind! But always too late, only after he’d been up to his eyes in human blood. Danton, Robespierre, Marat, and Saint-Just were too busy going after one another to notice the ambitious pint-sized general, and out he slipped between their legs to slaughter half of mankind for his greatness. Hitler should have been bumped off ten years ago (if not before) and Mussolini should have been given a resounding thrashing ten years before that until he cried and begged for mercy. He would have, too. As things stand, it will take a war and a victory at God knows what price (if we even win!) to finally strangle those two historical apes. It will be too late again, too late … because of that very same Hamlet-like inertia and naïveté.”
“Do you think, then, that anything can be achieved, on a large scale, through personal terrorism and assassination?”
“Assassination, assassination, yes of course!” Don Fernando agreed with a curious kind of rage. “Give the scoundrel a taste of fear on his own hide! It’s always educational! This seems to be the only kind of pedagogy these villains understand. Fear. Your fear and mine, that’s what the scoundrel should be made to feel! If nothing else, it would give me satisfaction—‘tremble, tremble, scoundrel,’ as they sing in the opera.”
Don Fernando took a breath. He was profoundly agitated, his face flushed bright red, the corners of his lips flecked with foam. He used a handkerchief to wipe his mouth, forehead, and cheeks, as if wiping a mask from his face. His features did in fact regain the exalted expression of his serene internal glow. He was now embarrassed by his excitement, letting the breeze of a kindly smile play over his face and conceal the shame.
“You seem, however, to prefer fairy tales of one sort and another,” he said superciliously.
“What fairy tales?” said Melkior in surprise.
“Oh, Russian fairy tales about various forms of goodness … Such as the one about Alyosha Karamazov, the little monk. You even gauge that drunken cynic Maestro using the little monk as a standard. But he doesn’t fit the standard, it’s too narrow for him. Your standards are too strict, my dear Eustachius—and too regular. People are like stones: irregular in shape, heavy, scattered. It’s the devil’s own job bringing order to the lot, assembling them in one place and arranging them by this or that rule—and it’s even worse hewing each individual stone. Indeed it’s impossible to carve out what people like to call a ‘moral profile.’ Illusory is what it is.”
This is something he has going on with himself, thought Melkior. I’ve never spoken to him about “goodness” or “standards.” He must be struggling with some “little monk” of his own.
“Incidentally, you haven’t asked me how all this fits in with my actual political convictions,” asked Don Fernando suddenly, giving a dry and somehow malicious laugh.
“Now that you mention it, did you ever discuss this with Pupo?”
“With Pupo? Discuss what with him?” said Don Fernando in surprise.
“Why, this business of … of individual terror … and assassinations.”
“Why with Pupo? Is he an expert on such things? He believes the man who bashed Trotsky’s head in with an ice pick was a Mexican anarchist acting on his own initiative, that Tukhachevsky was spying for the Nazis, and so on … he believes a lot of things. He is of course against ‘individual terror.’ ‘That’s anarcho-individualism,’ and he immediately reaches for the corresponding pigeonhole. Pupo’s a sort of monk himself, but one who keeps an eye on his career—in fact, a defrocked priest who goes on believing through inertia, but in rather a Jesuit way. I’ve nothing to discuss with him.”
“So I’m honored with this discussion?” smiled Melkior.
“You are a sensitive individual capable of feeling a thought. Not merely thinking (perhaps thinking even less), but also feeling a thought, which means keeping it constantly in your mind like private torment. The Heautontimoroumenos, murderer and victim in one and the same person, knife and wound, a vampire of your own heart, as Baudelaire put it. Your thought torments you with fear, I know it and appreciate it, because few people are capable of it, particularly in the way you are—and those drunken imbeciles at the Give’nTake mock you for it. I don’t mock you, because fear is thought (and vice versa), and I should like to join you at this point, if I may. Our fear is the sensitivity of the thought with which we perceive the terrible future of our existence. (Not that the human future has ever been anything but dreadful.) Your fear is not insane, your quaking is not inane as a Quaker’s, and yet there is in you (and this is where I leave you) a maniacal need to study the fear, to explore all its tonalities and tastes, from bitter to sweet. Sweet in particular. For there is a kind of pleasure in the sensation of fear (I remember it from childhood), a possibility of some obscure inner florescence taking place, of some strange solitary ripening going on to produce the black fruit of a particularly bitter wisdom. You have made yourself a home in there and you no longer search for a way out of the mousetrap—you have found your ‘accursed’ freedom inside. ‘Accursed’ because you exercise it in the pathetic manner of a prisoner for life who has found a ‘great’ pastime: drying his straw mattress straw by straw on the single ray of sun that falls into his cell …”
“Straw is, as we know, hollow. Are you sure it’s in my mattress and not your head?” Melkior took offense and rejoindered rudely, which made Don Fernando flush pink.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it so offensively. I meant to say that fear has tricked your imagination, but it came out all wrong. That bit about the prisoner was particularly bad. Fear has hidden its hideous face, which the wise man finds is beneath him to contemplate and generally beneath the accomplished man to address. That is why I meant to say that your fear was highly refined, all the richer for the beauties of your unconventional character, brought to virtuoso level, as it were, like the subtlest of vibratos on a violin string (this with reference to trembling), elevated to the point of the highest—indeed musical—sensitivity, ceasing to be a miserable human condition and becoming a work of some crazed art instead. Your alchemy has transmuted that filth into gold. That’s why I admire … Forgive me for calling it crazed—after all, any art is crazed in a certain way … that’s why I admire your heroism, for you know how to suffer. My fear is different. I don’t want to suffer. I’m afraid of what tomorrow may bring, as it may well bring it tomorrow, and there’s no rhetoric in it. I’m simply afraid for myself, for my pitiful life, like any ant that feels a storm brewing, and I have no particular ‘spiritual values’ in mind. I don’t care what happens to paintings, to books, to arty rocks. I simply fear, henlike, for my unprotected head, which in my hour of fear is my greatest cultural value, for it’s the only head that cares for me. To sum up, then: my fear is no violin vibrato, no vibrato at all, for that matter; there’s no subtlety to it, no art, no beauty—it’s intolerant, harsh, and aggressive. I don’t propose to ‘suffer for beauty,’ I don’t propose to cultivate fear like a poisonous flower garden. I’m less of a hero than you. I can’t support fear—that’s why I want to remove it from my life, like hundreds of millions of like-minded people.”
“But how are you going to remove it?” asked Melkior with grave concern. “And who are your like-minded people?”
“Common people, that’s who. Perhaps these very passersby around us. They all want to get where they’re going, to eat their lunch or kiss their wife, without the feeling of pressure in their mind, without a nightmare on their soul, with joy and certainty as if they will live forever. And that’s reason enough for me to consider them ‘my people’; they may not know it, but they belong to the large community of enemies of fear.”
“How can you be sure they’re ‘your people’? They may just as well be on the other side, they may be in favor of fear, which such ‘passersby’ usually refer to as order. They are
in favor of order under the knout, and you offer them your concept of freedom, which is disorder and anarchy in their eyes.”
“What? Surely this is disorder, this general anxiety and uncertainty?”
“Anxiety and uncertainty for you, ‘the enemy.’ In their view, it’s no more than you deserve: you aim to bring down their ideals, kill off the leaders they worship precisely because they inspire fear. They want fear.”
“I’m not relying on those trained monkeys!” barked Don Fernando furiously.
“Whom are you relying on, then?”
“On men! On free, proud men who feel their human value, their dignity—”
“Again, this is a question of standards: what is human value?”
“Standards …” Don Fernando was smiling quaintly, in a “last straw” sort of way, like someone tried to the very limit of his patience. “I know just where to claim my right to the discovery of new value and I reject any attempt to drag in standards as a piece of bothersome claptrap! I have no time to waste on procedural ins and outs, the only thing that matters is value, and I have a perfectly clear idea of what it is!”
“So let’s get on with the shooting, poisoning, setting of time bombs, bashing people’s heads in with ice picks? And all that on I-know-who’s-worthless grounds. Here take a look at the little man on the corner—that’s right, the one selling newspapers.”
The news vendor was crying the third edition of the Morning News. He was indeed a little man, as Melkior put it—ageless, scaled down, as if he had been built with an eye to skimping on material, his arms and legs short, his head small and narrow, but with a hunk of trumpety nose protruding from it, along with two large and floppy ears topped by a vendor’s cap like an upside-down pot, showing a logo for the Morning News. He was trumpeting through his nose, in a snot-ridden and tearful voice, as if begging alms, “Mawnen Ooze! Mawnen Ooze!”