Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (12 page)

That scrawny body! That scrawny body of yours had gone underground inside its skeleton, hidden itself, insinuated itself into the bones and there felt the security of a snail, of a mouse in its hole, a hedgehog underneath its prickles. The body had simply proclaimed, I’m not there! And then later on, in the sanctuary, during a moment of respite between two fears, there began to germinate the idea of cannibals and castaways, as a lark, in a sunny and almost wanton way, such as when we indulge in the profligate waste of food after satisfying our hunger.

And tonight at the Cozy Corner, to the accompaniment of Kurt’s plangent chant, over the sausage and Kurt’s fingers, there resurfaced the wanton largesse of a skeleton which served fresh live man-meat to cannibals while itself feeding moderately and carefully lest some flesh appear on it, lest the body peek out. That was where the notion of cannibals resurfaced. The ship already had its name: the
Menelaus.
It had been sailing, after ten nights or so of its dangerous wartime voyage, through the Tonga archipelago (called the Friendly Islands by the Europeans) between the islands of Wawau and Tongatabu, making for Tutuila—or, more specifically, for the port of Pago-Pago—there to take on a load of copra for oil extraction. The previous night the captain had studied the charts of the archipelago (what a pretty word, archipelago) and that night it’s That’s all, folks, there’s a war on, the
Menelaus
is going down.

Having been hit by a torpedo, the
Menelaus
—husband to Fair Helen (the whore, the whore, of the Trojan war)—goes down. But never mind the ship, it’s the people that matter … there are only seven survivors. Six, actually, because the seventh, an old seaman with a pipe, is captured by Polynesian cannibals hours after the rest, thus arriving barely in time to see the cooking of the ship’s cook. But—as Hamlet would have put it—not where he cooked but where he was being cooked, at a merry cannibal party complete with folk dances that have conquered Europe, via America, and, in the process of the Hellenization of cannibal culture, have become more universal and thrilling than Aeschylus or Sophocles. That is when the ship’s cynic, a doctor by profession, declares that the cook had been dispatched to the dark world of cannibal gourmanderie with honors rather too high for his sheep’s brains—which, incidentally, he had fixed splendidly aboard the
Menelaus.

But before being cooked, the castaways are stripped naked and taken before some sort of board just like recruits. (Another twenty-odd days and there would be a fresh summons, the seventh so far: draftee Melkior Tresić is to present himself at the Recruiting Center for a physical examination to determine the degree of his fitness for service. … The medical board would be chaired by flat-footed ex-Austro-Hungarian army colonel Pechárek. First the speech: “Bwave soldiers and you gwaduate dwaftees … In dese gwave times yo’ King and countwy ex-pect in-twepid duty” … The naked men shivering with cold, nerves, timidity; some covering their hanging gardens with their hands, the more audacious among the “bwaves” lifting them to tickle the frightened, goose-pimpled backsides of the shy ones in front. For the seventh time draftee Melkior Tresić would have the height-measuring bar insultingly dropped on his head, inhale-exhale, I’ll cheat them of a few liters of air again, the captain with the snake of Asclepius on his epaulettes would probe his bicep with two fastidious fingers: serious asthenia, deferred service. … But there could no longer be any deferment, either-or time is here! A hushed argument at the other side of the table. Pechárek would not release his morsel. Emaciated, gaunt, nothing but skin and bones, says Asclepius, but no matter, the skin will do for King and countwy, not to mention the bones, for the skin’s got thoughts buried inside, skin and bones, well, get them into olive drabs, the skin and bones, top them off with an army cap and let them sizzle quietly underneath as per King’s Regulations—all four parts, by Jove!) The cannibal tribe’s Pechárek with a ring through his nose, cook or butcher, perhaps even the king himself, expertly appraises the briskets, rumps, sirloins on the naked men and designates the cook to be dinner with a single gesture of his hand. The second fattest, the company agent, faints. The others watch their destiny with horror. Only the ship’s doctor (the redheaded, freckled cad!) keeps his intelligent curiosity separate, making his appraisal as if he, too, were on the council, dressed in the naked brown skin that confers upon one the privilege of recruiting meat. With care, almost with tenderness, he sends his anatomical gaze gliding over the broad, brawny back of the chief engineer, crawling down his obese frame, orbiting flylike his arrogantly jutting belly, embracing his thighs with what is nearly loving tenderness and pronounces “number three” inside his head with perfidious certainty.

Poor chief engineer! Feeling the rat’s cold snout on his skin, and painfully aware of his place in the terrifying chronology, he is unable to conceal his envy of the doctor’s physical repugnance.

That is all the snake of Asclepius needs to corroborate his conclusion. Among these aristocrats of the flesh, the doctor is a miserable, stinking creature which has suddenly sensed its advantage. Out there, in that “other world,” his body has had him consigned to a hell of loneliness. In the world of fragrances, where the standard smells are confined to special establishments, there to be flushed by water and battered by concoctions of chemicals and perfumes, he has to carry with him that very establishment with his quite unconventional, nonpatented, somehow original smell, horribly aware that his condition is definitive. He yearns for company, friends, women. Even women he pays for refuse to suffer his presence any longer than the job requires. In Shanghai he was told by a fat Romanian woman, who stank of sweat herself, that he had
such a strange
smell. … “Oh God, I smell bad, I stink!” He is convinced that he stinks all over, that his walk stinks, his motions, his gaze, his voice, that his speech spreads an insupportably foul atmosphere in which people choke.

He finds his own smell rank. He has soaped, scrubbed, washed himself, he has doused himself with fragrant fluids and oils, he has bathed in the sea, exposed his body to wind and rain, baked it in the sun, but the treacherous thing only developed a bran-colored rash and vile red spots, living wounds. His kinky red hair, his stubbly, sparse, barely visible eyebrows, everything, has been seared, demolished by hot water, soap, and the most shocking cosmetic hoaxes to which the wretch falls prey only too readily. Like a leper, he is aware of being eternally excluded from anything social and human, enjoyable and beautiful, from anything that is accessible to everyone else.

The poor ship’s doctor!

But look: for all that he is a captive of Polynesian cannibals, facing the cauldron of death, draftee Melkior Tresić suddenly envies the doctor! He feels an awful pleasure at the man’s repugnant body, at his stench, at his poor outcast physical person! They will smell him out, he will get away—he is inferior man-meat for the gourmands.

Watching the captain’s plump, well-rounded curves, the chief engineer’s strong, meaty shoulders, and the first mate’s delicate, pale dreamer’s flesh, the doctor comes to feel a certain cannibalistic pleasure at the tasty tidbits, at the superior flesh which had relished food, renown, respect, and love to the full. He is now certain of holding last place, or at worst of being tied for last with the crusty old seaman.

Meanwhile, heh, heh … he has only to wait for the natives to give him back his clothes. He has a miracle-working gadget or two in his pockets.

And indeed he gets his clothes back. He and the crusty old seaman. But the officers’ uniforms, decorated with golden anchors, ribbons, and buttons, go to the king and his top two dignitaries, who parade them complete with hats. After dining on the cook, the hosts do a few of the latest cha-cha dances and retire sated and well pleased.

The six castaways are spending their first Polynesian night in a small circular hut made of bamboo stalks interwoven with reeds. After the inevitable petty squabble over the choice of sleeping space (the farther from the doctor and the crusty seaman, the better) in that cramped circle underneath a mud-and-reed dome, the two despised Clotheds and the four distinguished Nakeds settled down at last like so many birds captured under a straw hat.

But sleep will not come. Listening, each with his personal anxiety, to monkeys chattering in the nearby jungle, the castaways remember with indignation their celebrated fellow Westerner who proclaimed them, a hundred or so years before, the great-grandsons of that grotesque parody of humanity which swings from branch to branch and shrieks in hot, tropical nights. They are now disgusted by Tarzan’s virginal heroism, and with indignation invite Messrs. Defoe, Burroughs, and Kipling kindly to join them in these Robinsonian and Tarzanian and Rikki-Tikki-Tavian beauty spots and in the pristine idyll of the Polynesian cannibal island!

The wretched cook! As they listen through the endless night to mournful squawks of the cockatoo, it seems to them that the cook’s white soul is nostalgically looking for its body and, unable to find it, is wandering in the night, lost and miserable like a frightened bird, pleading for help and salvation. The very souls of the Nakeds go numb at those onomatopoeias inviting them to psittacine eternity.

And up there, at celestial heights, carelessly hang the bright tropical stars, swinging on starlight-spun threads to relieve the boredom of their eternal existence. The stars play their games in the blue space above the cannibal island, slinging meteors which fall in fiery arcs into the dark tropical seas.

Draftee Melkior Tresić has sailed away on his Menelaian bed.
Indonésie. Polynésie. Poésie.
The Dream Archipelago! (there is a novel of that title). Archipelagos. Atolls and lagoons. Hawaii—whence the charm of that word? “You and me and blue Hawaii …”

He swears with despair in that lonely night. God who is supposed to see all and know all! And the company agent shivers with fever. He is aware of his place in the series: it can happen tomorrow or the day after. … The ship’s doctor offers help, massage of the head, of a neck muscle, which can be rendered insensitive. … The agent calls him a criminal and a cynic.

“Alas, gone is our good cook,” is the doctor’s response to his rudeness.

The agent bursts into tears.

Nobody heeds his sobs. Everyone is feeling himself in the dark, examining the state of his body and fuming at it. The findings are weighty, grave, fatal, like accusations of a stupid kind of recklessness which has brought them to ruin.

To end up in a cannibal cauldron. Appalling.

Someone is pummeling himself angrily and cursing his flesh. It is, the doctor knows, “Number Three,” the chief engineer. The chief engineer is punishing his disobedient belly with desperate hatred, but also with some hope that he might thus flatten it, diminish it, force it inward and conceal it from the cannibal gourmets. He has moreover arrived at the idea of “an operation” and communicated it to the doctor.

The red-headed cynic laughs out loud. “And what about me? Who’s to take the steaks and bacon off of me?”

“But you, er, you don’t really need to, do you?”

“No, what I need is a helicopter. Give me a helicopter, or at least a common variety hot-air balloon to lift me up out of this terrestrial paradise and I’ll shape you into such a repulsive, skinny piece of misery that you will disgust even the cannibals. I await your reply. Ridiculous.”

The chief engineer sighs and abandons all hope.

The captain is cursing his “damned appetite” in a low voice. Reproaching himself for sumptuous meals in his past life. The tempestuous symphonies of delectable delights, largely the fault of that fat idiot whom “they” cooked today. Passing before his eyes are solemn columns of glorious breakfasts, lunches, and dinners marching with thick bacon strips taken off incomparable Yorkshire pigs, echelons of yellow ham-and-eggs, slender slices of bacon, ham and Italian mortadella, thrilling goose liver, rabbit, and partridge pátés; perfidious shrimps march past and bowlegged frogs in batter leotards, splashing saucily through a delicate whiskey sauce, rice pudding, and the most exquisite creams spread sweetly all over the valley of the elect, while atop the holy lake of gourmanderie float lard halos like the metallic sounds of the angelus of eventide in the hills. Ah, that is all the dead sounds of Yorkshire grunts and Scottish clucks, of hissing, frying, and cooking in the accursed galley of the
Menelaus
, all that is nothing but the late memory of yolks being beaten, plates clanking, glasses clinking, and corks popping! And what has the captain got to show for all the festivities? Ah, if only it were possible to say “Nothing!” with a decadent sigh—what he has to show is his stupidly tight-packed personal can of meat, perfidiously seasoned with all the monstrous spices of gluttonous folly as a splendidly packaged delicacy the sight of which sends saliva trickling down the teeth of the voracious savages.

The poor captain heaves a sigh from the bottom of his heart and utters, without knowing why, an obvious piece of drivel:

“Damn it all, if only we’d remembered to bring a compass!”

“Damn it all, yes!” comes an ironic voice from the dark. “But given our navigational expertise I’m sure we’ll be able to plot our course in a cauldron full of water.”

It is the first mate, a pale young man with a white, henlike complexion, handsome in a rather effeminate way, delicate and sensitive like a pampered only daughter. The long and boring voyages in the Merchant Marines have pushed his melancholy nature to a gloomy spleen and a certain state of bitter depression and sarcasm. Feeling alone in the world, he finds Nirvana quite early on in a Hong Kong opium den.

Deprived now of his drug, he is naturally irritable. He has gone a whole day without a whiff of his bliss, knows that he will never have any again, and the knowledge is driving him desperate. He keeps smacking his head and mumbling idiotic gibberish.

The red-headed Asclepius knows what this is like and tries to relieve his transient pain by offering him the imminent prospect of eternal peace in genuine and, so to speak, natural nothingness. But nothing, not even the cannibal void, can comfort the pale first mate. All he announces is his simple revulsion with such a death. He can well elaborate in his mind Hamlet’s thought about a king passing through the intestines of a beggar and is quite indifferent when imagining himself making his last journey in a state of mastication. He is just revolted, that is all. But this, the idea of “living in infernal reality” and never again, never again having a sniff, even if the “never again” lasts only three days—this he finds unbearable.