Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

  “Somewhere high and dry? Man, we are under a roof ! Spreading far above our heads, black as dreadful night … that’s how the purple poem The Umbrella runs. Has anyone written the poem about the umbrella? No? Of course not … black as night snuffed …” declaimed Maestro using pathos to summon his next line. “Lend us a hand, Eustachius, I’ve hit a snag, it’s a pathos-ridden ascent … black as night snuffed … never you mind, I’ll write it later.” He fell silent for a moment, wiping his nose. “Right—let Cyrano’s humiliated comrade breathe his fill of the evening’s rainy air,” he took the handkerchief off his nose and inhaled greedily. “They’re right—contact with Nature … even by way of the nose, is contact with—that is, a stab at—Nature … by which I mean nothing but the pure fragrance of dainty flowers. … Hey, I’ve come to the conk-lusion it’s pretty stupid to tote about such a big conch of a conk. And duels are a thing of the past, more’s the pity, I can’t do a Bergerac and … I would have challenged him to one … without using a glove—just giving him a plain old slap in the face … à la barrière and may the best man win! As it is, all you get is Bergerac, an honorless hunk of nose, leaking snot beneath an umbrella. You rode to a duel in a coach: black redingote, top hat, pistol-case—heroism and toughened honor. Nowadays drivers stink of petrol and fight with their bare fists. En garde, sir, en garde! But the driver spits on his palms and then it’s whack! in the chops—there’s progress for you, Eustachius my dear companion.”

  “And you would challenge him to a fencing duel?” grinned Melkior.

  “So I would, Eustachius! Whooosh! and off with his ear!” Maestro swung his saber at Freddie and took keen delight at the sight of Freddie’s severed ear flying off. “And then a cat that was following us (cats can sense this sort of thing), that was on the lookout for scraps of flesh …” giving his fancy free rein, relishing his revenge. “Or what do you say I lop off his nose? The effect’s even greater! and then the cat …”

  He’ll have read this in Edmond About, thought Melkior, a Croatian translation of A Notary’s Nose was published not long ago. …

  “A noseless Lothario, ha-ha,” rejoiced Maestro. “Cat got his nose!”

  They had reached the unpaved, muddy, dark reaches of the city outskirts.

  Dogs started barking at them from small fenced front gardens.

  “You’d better take the lead now, Maestro,” said Melkior, “I can’t see a thing, nor do I know the way …”

  “This way, just follow me along these fences,” Maestro directed him with assurance. “Only mind the barking guardians of private property, they’re very eager. If you so much as touch the fence they’ll think you want to steal a head of cabbage from their garden and they might trim your fingers for you. ‘Hands off!’ is what this barking means,” prattled on Maestro tottering on ahead of Melkior. “And when an old muzzle starts snarling on the left, we’re to turn right; he is the lighthouse in this nocturnal cruise. When he dies I don’t know how I’ll manage to find my way when in a state of illumination.”

  “They’ll put up electric lights,” chuckled Melkior.

  “Electric lights … that’s not my way,” Maestro halted warningly. “If your electric lights was meant to provoke me, Eustachius, I can tell you it went wide of the mark.” Although he was leading the way, Maestro was speaking very seriously. “I don’t care much for people thinking my convictions backward and laughable. I’m capable of laughing better than any of you Parampionists, thank you very much.”

  “You took offense all the same, didn’t you?”

  “Well … not exactly. You can take offense if you’re … disappointed, if you’d expected something else or … but that’s beside the point. … That is to say, if you’re promoting your ideas, seeking followers … and I don’t give a tinker’s for the whole ballgame, cherished Eustachius. I’m not being ironic at all when I say cherished, because …” Maestro seemed to hesitate for a moment before deciding to keep something to himself. “Careful now, there’s a ditch here with a lot of mud in it, they’re laying an idea of sewage-pipe order, ha-ha, you’ll have to jump across it. Hop!” Maestro swung his arms and jumped across, “right, from now on it’s all safe going, down along the fences.” He was silent for a moment, struggling with the mud in which his feet were sinking. “I’ve got you into a nice mess, haven’t I, Eustachius—quite literally so.”

  “Isn’t there some other way?”

  “Yes there is—a roundabout road. Electric lights and all—but I wanted to show you my way, my dark way. Perhaps it will help you understand me better. Here he is, snarling—now turn right, Eustachius, after me.” Indeed a dog did heave a geriatric wheeze, as if too feeble to bark. “Did you hear that memento along my way? Dies irae. He’s got nothing against me, he only gives voice to guide me. The lighthouse keeper. And up there, look up, Eustachius. … Ah, the umbrella! Fold the umbrella, look up … those black lines, those staves, empty of notes, across the sky, That’s It—the Powerline. You, of course, find my hate of those copper wires ridiculous?”

  “I’m already used to your bizarre views. …”

  “But I’m not after anything bizarre, kindhearted Eustachius—I genuinely hate the thing,” said Maestro very quietly, indeed with a kind of modesty.

  For some time they trudged squelching on across the slippery mud. Maestro had trouble pulling his feet from the clay dough. Melkior had to help his unstable guide several times. A kind of mud Inferno, thought Melkior, with Virgil somewhat tipsy and crazed. He has changed—he is not mad for the sake of madness but with a sincere and true madness. Perhaps the spirochaetae are adding to it by completing their arduous work. Gnawing asunder the last of the filaments for the proper connections, as in a telephone exchange … wrong number, this is a private residence, yes, yes, the last digit’s four, four … I still have Enka’s key … Put it in a small oblong box (toothpaste?) and send it by registered mail. … But leave that for tomorrow, leave it for tomorrow … without a word, thank you for everything, I think we are now quits. Even if she writes another letter, if her words bring those waves of goose bumps down the thighs and desire starts snailing up the spine … it should all be shaken off—apage! apage!—like Saint Anthony, the anchorite of Thebes. Very good, sir, but what if she appears in person? Shall we do apage! Like … the anchorite saint, chop off a finger on the block like Father Sergius … (the film with Mozhukhin, what rot!), shall we refrain, following the doctrine of the aged Count Leo …

  “So, Eustachius,” spoke up Maestro, “this is where we leave the fences. We strike out diagonally across this little field, down the path, toward that black silhouette—There Is My Home,” he finished in a tuneless version of the Czech national anthem.

  Over the herd of low hovels that had dug themselves into the ground up to their knees in modesty and impoverished shame there loomed self-assuredly but quite unconvincingly a dark five- or six-story monster …

  “What’s that thing doing here?” said Melkior in surprise.

  “It used to be a storage facility for the bastards of the city’s bon vivants,” replied Maestro, the Inferno guide. “This is where unwed mothers used to wait for the fruits of their sinful loves to be born. Here bawled the unacknowledged counts, barons, dukes, in the arms of their mothers, crazy virgins. Of course, everything in noble penury, in rags worn with dignity. At this point, few of the old-timers are on speaking terms with each other, they’re like Russian émigrés —it’s beneath them to speak to just anyone. Now and then they jump from the top stories; they’re the real thing, the ones who don’t go for suicide notes and shit like that. But there are also the snobs—jumping from the second floor, feet first of course, into the grass. Breaking bones, getting their heads smashed … They leave their ‘life stories’ behind with detailed ‘pedigrees’—eager for a headline, of course …”

  “And you write them up …”

  “Yes, I do them that small favor—they take some risk after all … Some of them actually succeed.”

  “Why,
it’s … How can you live here?” Melkior was horrified, “… it’s a suicide house!”

  “No, why? It’s a kindergarten!” laughed Maestro with malevolent glee. “You say what you like, it has a certain charm all its own. The charm of the waltz. The upper-story types don’t do it all that often, and the lower-story types … heh-heh … There’s this ‘Baron Sigismund.’ Si-gis-mund is not to blaaame for setting girrrls hearts aflaaame …” all of a sudden Maestro launched into a hoarse rendition of a number from the operetta The White Horse Inn, but presently grew serious again “… who has jumped grassward twice. The first time it was trouble with the ladies. He wears a pencil moustache and a monocle, all our fifty-year-old virgins (we’ve got a lot of those) are crazy about him; there was nothing for him to do but jump. The second time he jumped because of the fourth partition of Poland, the autumn before last. A nobleman and a knight! Knows all of Sienkiewicz by heart—but doesn’t know a word of Polish. Kobieta and herbata—the two Polish words I know—mean woman and tea, respectively … I also know the word bardzo … it doesn’t mean quickly the way brzo means in Croatian. … I forget what it means. Szesdziesiat piec means sixty-five. … Sigismund doesn’t even know what szesdziesiat piec means, but that doesn’t keep him from attempting suicide over Poland, Pan Podbipieta strike him. But what was I going to … oh yes, I was going to say this is a true ‘home of the gentry,’ indeed a house of knights.”

  “Speaking of which, how’s the knightly nose?” Melkior halted at the entrance.

  “I’d already forgotten about it. But it seems to be feeling quite well in its larger-than-life-size like a statue in the middle of a town square. But what have you stopped for, Eustachius? Afraid of the dark in the stairwell? Wait, I’m going to strike a light; you can go up after me.”

  “I’m not coming up with you, Maestro,” Melkior barely managed to spit out the words; he knew they were going to sadden Maestro. “I’m sorry, but I really …”

  “What, you don’t mean to come up?” mumbled Maestro in poignant disappointment. “And I thought … You promised me so long ago! I’d been looking for you all evening, there was this Corso business, too …” he seemed to have pointed to his nose in the dark, “and now you won’t …”

  Melkior felt sorry. It was as if Maestro had put out a hand, begging for alms. … Fear of loneliness? The suicide house? What is it he wants tonight? To put himself to death in a brand new original medicinally pure fashion? He spoke mockingly about jumping from upper and lower windows. He’s against jumping.

  “Do come, Eustachius, for half an hour only,” pleaded Maestro. He plucked a candle stub out of his pocket and lit it. “Here, I’ll walk ahead and light the way. … I won’t keep you long.” Melkior followed him upstairs. “And the way back … there’s a roundabout, over there, a proper road. Pavements and electric lights,” he laughed in a way that seemed almost shy.

  The stairwell reeked of stale cabbage, urine, and unwashed women. How can you have any kind of “medicinally pure” death in here? Melkior was nauseated by the cocktail of smells.

  Clambering up the stairs on the wall behind them were two huge, terrifying hunchbacks. Melkior glimpsed their escort out of the corner of his eye. He turned around: he saw two quiet, patient gorillas, long-armed, noseless … we’re following you to the zoo.

  “Have a look, Eustachius. Behind each of these doors,” he gestured at a row of doors in long dark corridors, “lives an exemplar, usually single, of those bastard gentlefolk in noble penury, in rags worn with dignity. The life of a convent—the cell being what is known as a room with cooking facilities; independence fiscal and otherwise … I now recommend a quiet ascent,” warned Maestro in a whisper, “we’re entering the habitat of street vendors of holy pictures, picture postcards, and writing paper—but at this late hour they might offer us interesting collections of pictures for the single man. They serve (for those who like them) as inspiration for solipsistic pleasures—Ramona, give my soul its peace and quiet …”

  Melkior cast a furtive glance at his gorilla: what was it doing? It hunched its back, compressed itself, poised. … Maestro lifted the candle, the creatures crouched on the wall, bowing to the light.

  “Here, Eustachius, behind this door,” whispered Maestro, “breathes the knightly soul of Baron Sigismund. If we hold our breath we might hear Andrzej Kmicic decapitating Tartars. Ssss …” he put his ear to the door. “No, Pan Wolodiowski’s wife is dead—he’s crying.”

  “What is he—mad?”

  “Depends on your viewpoint. Do you find Don Quixote mad? This one is fond of knights, too. We’ve strayed too deep, Eustachius the Myrrh-Exuding, into belle-esprit-ism of the ovine variety. Grazing on daisies in meadows—she loves me, she loves me not—exactly like sheep and goats, like meek Bethlehem sheep. Dainty souls in quatrains, in crowns of sonnets, ahs and ohs and love that never palls … what a load of balls! Whereas they charged tanks armed with spears, credo quia absurdum. …”

  “Who did?”

  “Who? The knights, that’s who! The Pans! Skrzetuski, Wolodiowski … never mind their names, the awakened forefathers! At Kutno, at Kutno was where the spearmen, the cavalrymen … we carried the story in our paper … went in against the Teutons, like Boleslaw the Crooked Mouth in the Middle Ages,” Maestro crooked his own mouth in honor of the royal moniker.

  Crooked Mouth—that one is missing from my Great Rulers list, thought Melkior.

  “How long have you been such a knightly person then?”

  “Perhaps since birth, Eustachius. I may be a Porphyrogenite, too, or a Leopold the Landless—this remains to be seen. You’ll know me in my full glory yet. Here we are, Eustachius.” Maestro held the candle aloft: halt! In the flickering candlelight, with its presence-of-death paraffin odor, there was a photograph stuck on the door: a bon vivant with a pencil moustache and a smile under a rakishly angled Maurice Chevalier straw hat.

  “And this …”

  “… is me, God bless the master of this house. Dating from the age of the Charleston, Eustachius: adieu, Mimi. … In lieu of a visiting card with a nobleman’s boar or some other ferocious animal. Enter my kingdom, Eustachius!” But Maestro bumped into something inside, in the dark; his candle went out in the draft when he opened the door. “Ah yes, the warning. Wait a moment.” He was striking matches and looking for the candle, but the matches went out, too, in the gust of air.

  “Please stay where you are, Eustachius. There are certain small warnings here by the door. It’s my sober self in the morning asking a wardenlike question of my drunken self in the evening: where do you think you’re going, you nitwit? Thus the small reality of a common table blocks my way to the door opposite, which could take me to eternity. Can you see the sky? Because all this, dear Eustachius, is taking place on the fourth floor, and my angelic wings are quite stunted. …” explained Maestro from the dark, now using the blind man’s sense to grope for the oil lamp.

  He’ll knock it over, spill the oil, set the house afire. …

  But Melkior’s fears came to naught. Maestro lit the lamp quickly and with amazing dexterity as if he had flipped on a switch. “Buona sera,” he said with a bow.

  An odd mix of coffee and lamp oil smells wafted over Melkior from inside.

  “Do sit down, Eustachius, anywhere you like. Everything’s clean in here, that is to say the chairs and the chest are—but don’t look at the floor, it’s fertile soil, I’m planning to plant it with tomatoes.”

  The room was with a cooking stove, as he said, and the floor coated with dried mud. Soil, that is, probably fertile at that. But the seats of both chairs were freshly scrubbed, as was the lid of the enormous chest. What did he keep in there?

  Melkior sat down on a chair. Perhaps the dismembered body of a woman? A victim of sadistic lust. … Has anyone seen Viviana? He looked around the room as if with an eye to discovering clues … bloodstains, a hair or two, a torn shred of an undergarment … He surprised himself with the thought—God, what rubbish!—and looked b
ack at Maestro, confused, with a pang of guilt.

  “… perhaps since birth, even,” Maestro had been saying while Melkior was not listening. “And why am I one of the prize exhibits in this museum? You think I’m not authentic … oh, oh, oh, I merit preservation in alcohol—mind, body, and all! They call it compote up at the clinic. If you didn’t know, how will you ever be able to eat canned fruit again, when the plums, cherries, peach slices will … ah, merde! Medical science has befouled all of life. Reposing in alcohol is my destiny, even if only in pieces: some details of me are bound to get into the … alcohol compote. Damn it all, I should now heave a sigh of longing as befits a true-blue tippler!”

  Melkior felt uneasy: set out in his imagination as if on shelves were a row of jars with severed ears, tongues, penises. … He gave a shudder. He wished he could get away.

  “You’re chilly, Eustachius. I’ll stoke the stove straight away, get you warm in no time at all.”

  In one corner of the room stood a folded iron cot with a rolled straw mattress in it. Maestro pulled a whole sheaf of straw from it, fed it into the stove, arranged some cordwood on top and lit it all. The fire set up a mournful mumble under the iron burner, came to life in its grave, thought Melkior.

  “Do you always pull straw from your …” he nearly said grave “… from your bed?”

  “Indeed I do. Stupid, isn’t it? And you spotted it right off. I steal from myself, dear Eustachius, like an imbecile out of Molière, only to end up sleeping on what used to be straw, on nothing but the little souls of the burnt straw. Once I even dreamed the burning souls. There were tens of thousands of them. You can well imagine how many I’ve burned, tantamount to some Spanish Inquisitor. There were all these little burning candles going around and around my bed, singing in piping female voices requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua … the ‘lux perpetua’ coming from the straw! What a ridiculous business. I woke up in cold sweat.”