Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (17 page)

“What a harlot you are!” he told her with awe. He, too, was laughing. Everyone was laughing.

“And you’re a stupid little burglar. What did you expect me to tell him? That you were here?”

“You could have let it ring.”

“Oh, shut up. You’re so stupid. He would have rushed over in a taxi to see if anything had happened to me.”

“Poor Coco.”

“He’s happy because he knows nothing. He’s wonderful. So clever.”

“You love him?”

“Very much. In a different way.”

“And you have a good time with him?”

“Marvelous. In a different way. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Indeed I would not. Perfidious creatures. We love you, trust you …”

“Why shouldn’t you trust me? Come to me, my skinny one …”

Not tonight. He would have probably slapped her cheeks. He would ring her tomorrow. The petite, perfidious, laughing Enka.

“The tormentor” was jangling eagerly. But its clangor burst into the sleeper’s slumber like a bully and a heedless drunk. What a mess! Sleep sprang into action, slamming windows and doors, putting out lights, letting night flood in and restore peace. Telling a story about sailing the seas on a big white ship. “The tormentor” is now clanging deep down in the bowels of the ship, signaling the engine men to change speed: go slow, go quiet …

Smooth sailing. Stars. Lighthouses winking in the distance: hello, skipper, old chum. He, up there on the bridge, in the dark, smiling: hello, boys, you old night owls. His cigarette pushed to a corner of his mouth, to keep the smoke away. Sea wolf. To the helmsman: fifteen to starboard. Fifteen to starboard, echoes the helmsman as though chanting a litany: pray for me. He harkens to everything. Leading the ship as a general leads an army. She, Viviana, wrapped in a plaid blanket, peers at the compass and trembles like the night. He offers her his hand, she does not take it. He grabs her hand, she pulls it away timidly and tucks it under the plaid. He pushes the cigarette over to the other corner of the mouth with his tongue, squinches the other eye, and says to the helmsman: steady on. To her: let’s go. She (docilely): Where? He (resolutely): To die. She (worriedly): What about the ship?—It’s sailing on.—And the passengers?—They’re asleep.—What about the lighthouses?—Ahoy!—She: I can’t do it.—Why not?—I’ll show you something. Opening the plaid: look. And shows him a tiny penis and tiny, dovelike testicles. He slaps her lightly using only his fingertips, painless, symbolic. She: Does that mean you love me?—Yes. Pointing his cigarette at her miniatures: is this for fidelity?—Yes.—Penelope!—How dare you?—You aren’t familiar with the word?—No, I am not. It must be insulting.—It is not insulting. He’s no Ulysses. He’s a drunk.—It’s insulting anyway.—Helmsman, stuff the ears with wax. Lash me to the mast. One-eighty to port.—One-eighty to port.—Back to Polyphemus.—Back to Polyphemus.—Let the Cyclops, one-eyed beast, eat us all.—Let the Cyclops, one-eyed beast, eat us all.—There is no Ithaca.—There is no Ithaca.—Penelope has a penis.—Penelope has a penis.—Let’s toss her to the sharks …

“Skipper! The sirens, the sirens!” shouts the helmsman all of a sudden.

“Wax! Stuff the ears! Lash yourselves to the mast!”

A siren was already screaming over the city. Melkior leaped out of bed. Is this it? Or is it just an exercise? People were walking calmly down the street. The sentry was gazing at the passing women with a lustful gaze. No, this is not it, not yet. An exercise. Let’s phone Enka.

He was possessed by urgency, like someone completing a task against the clock. He rushed downstairs acknowledging no one to avoid being stopped for the ridiculous questions about his health, the war, politics. Many dreams, gentlemen, many dreams lately. Erotic ones. We haven’t the time.

Dial Ambulance Service, but make the last digit 4 instead of 3. That was how Enka had instructed him to call her. Busy signal. The coin dropped down. Again. He was dialing with furious intensity. He used to dial numbers on Enka’s breast, for a joke, after love-making, as they relaxed, naked, next to each other.

“Hullooo?” Her crooning voice over the telephone had always excited him.

“Hullo, Ambulance Service?” in a shaky voice, as if this really was an urgent matter. Grave emergency.

“Wrong number,” she answered in a convincingly cold, even bored voice. And, without replacing the receiver, she said over there, to
him
, “That was the fourth ape this morning.” And there was laughter, somehow insulting, over there, between
them.

Even though this was not the first time, he felt like a stranger, an outsider. Ape! She allotted him the same treatment as the three who had dialed the wrong number that morning, as the people who were a nuisance. She did it on purpose, for him to hear. She knew his voice, oh yes, she knew! Why did she choose today to let him overhear that he was that morning’s fourth annoying ape who didn’t know how to dial a number properly? Something like a trace of jealousy surfaced … No, not jealousy! He was fending off the feeling. She had slammed the door before his outstretched beggarly hand. Beggar? No: burglar! He was giving himself cynical airs. I’m plainly not up to the harlot’s clever tricks. After two years he still had not learned to adapt his sensitivity to her complicated conjugal situations which she breezed through using her innate low cunning. No amount of experience had protected him from being easily stung. She would laugh at his naïveté, later on, advance sensible reasons, bring him around. But she was not taking the smallest of risks. Moreover, she acquired security, she fortified her marital fidelity at the expense of his pride, his honor, his courtesy as her lover. With her cynicism she was far above his sensitivity, laughing her superior, her wanton laugh, being dreadfully distant, opaque, elusive, disgusting. How many times had he gone to her intending to have it out? To smack her right in her lying mouth, to yank out her tongue, to leave her, forever. And then he had again kissed the mouth, held the satanic little tongue between his teeth and felt its morbid softness as the truest truth in the world.

Someone grabbed him by the neck and spun him around. He saw Maestro’s unshaven face. They were standing in front of the newspaper building. “If you were going upstairs, don’t.” Maestro’s words were consecrated by matutinal brandy breath.

“I’ve got a review to …”

“Later. After it’s blown over. There’s one hell of a kerfuffle going on up there. The Old Man’s tearing jumbo-sized strips off the music guy.”

“What for?”

“I should hardly think it’s over Beethoven. They’re raging about technology and politics and what not … ‘Who cares about the music!’ I didn’t quite get it. Anyway, you know well enough what kind of a fix we’re in.”

“I don’t understand. Why should he shout at the …”

“He’s not shouting out of conviction. He’s shouting to be heard by the boss behind the upholstered door. You can barely be heard behind that door. You’ve really got to raise your voice. After all, it’s that kind of job and that kind of salary. It pays to shout, even against your convictions.”

“But what’s the reason? Why? Do you know?” Maestro’s obfuscations were irritating him.

“The reason is Beethoven, of all people.”

“So?”

“So … there was a gala production of
Fidelio
last night and the music guy reviewed it.”

“Well, what of it? He likes Beethoven!”

“He likes German music in general.” Maestro followed his broad hint with a grin.

“And the music guy didn’t praise Beethoven enough?”

“Oh, he did, he did. But the Old Man yelled at him, ‘What about the chronicler’s duty?’ ‘We’re a political paper’—or rather a ‘paper with a political profile,’ these were his exact words. And it was a gala production, get it? Personalities. He was supposed to mention the personalities in attendance.”

“Which of course he failed to do?”

“Yes. The hell with them! Let’s go have a snort of rotgut.”

“What’s a critic got to do with personalities? That’s something for you, for your City Desk.”

“Yes, for my Dustbin Desk. We get the rubbish, you get the cream. But it looks like things are changing—now everyone is getting rubbish. The great equalizer. Don’t let it get to you. Sooner or later we’ll all end on the rubbish heap. Such is the march of history. Let’s go have a snort. On me … ‘on the eve of historic times,’ as the boss put it in today’s editorial. Here you are—‘On The Eve Of Historic Times’ …”

“No, I’ve got to go upstairs!” and he started off with Quixote-like I’ll-show-’em steps, but Maestro held him back using both hands and muttering incomprehensibly.

“Beg pardon?”

“Did you know that last night Freddie gave Ugo a beating after all? After you left. Lucky thing you did—it was meant for you.”

“What was meant for me?” said Melkior absentmindedly, looking up at the editorial office windows.

“What? Come back down to Earth and I’ll tell you what: Freddie’s … got welts. Ugo plastered a few across his physiognomy. Here and there. Gave him a bloody nose. She wiped his blood off with her own little hand and her own little handkerchief. Tenderly. Which cost Ugo a kick, up his Krakatoa, I think.”

“Krakatoa?” Melkior was laughing.

“Yes, right up the crater, for the air pressure caused him to mumble ‘Umm,’ rather umbrageously.”

“And Viviana wiped away his blood?” Melkior was enjoying himself maliciously, avenged by Freddie’s foot.

“Viviana who?”

“Er … The beauty.”

“Her name is not Viviana, it’s …”

“That’s what I call her,” Melkior hastened to interrupt Maestro. He did not want to first hear her name from this drunk.

“Viviana—sure—crouches like a Samaritan by his head, and he, the aching wounded gentle knight, grunts and peeps up her skirt, ha-ha. … God, what shapes! I envied him his wounds.”

“What did Freddie do? Keep out of it?” Melkior was attempting to cover up his loser’s misery by making a show of curiosity.
ATMAN
was right—Ugo’s next.

“Keep out, hell! He called her back, tried to drag her away, ‘Leave the ape, let’s go.’ ‘You’re an ape. Get lost!’ And he actually went off with that Lady Macbeth. While She stayed with us—with Ugo, to be precise—and we proceeded to put on The Grand Show. The Fall of the Bastille, no less! We almost tore Thénardier’s ear off in revolutionary ardor. Ugo was great. What am I saying? Magnificent! She kept kissing his lip where it was swollen from Freddie’s blow, and every time she did he put his hand down her dress. Once he even brought the matter out into the open. God, what a Pompeian scene!”

“Was she drunk?” Melkior was seeking an excuse for her. He remembered Enka. I’ll call her.

“Drunk, infatuated, the lot. She asked him to take her home. He spent the night.”

“He did not!” the joyful truth flew out of Melkior, chirping like a bird.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. And another thing, I think very little of it is true. Ugo slept at home last night. I saw him.”

“Yes, well, whether you saw him or not, don’t be jealous, my dear Eustachius. Your turn will come. Mine won’t. Fate has made me the gift of The Great Solitude. A large cloak in which I don’t even have a flea for company. The hermit. Leone Eremita. The purist.
Vox clamantis.
Leopold by name, called Poldy. Even Polda, by the closer among my drunkard friends. And thus we arrive at the stable of the mammal Thénardier. Let us take a seat, Eustachius old son. Mammal Thénardier, two shots, shot to shot. As for the rest, let’s leave it to technology. To the various telegraph wires and high voltage. Known under the important name of cables. Especially electrical cables!” Maestro gave a derisive laugh. “What do you think, Eustachius, is there a telegraph line between the Vatican and the Kremlin? A secret line. Underground. Collusions, eh? If I could manage to dig it out somewhere, what a message I’d have, for them both! From the Carpathians.”

“Why the Carpathians, of all places?” But Melkior was thinking of Enka, defiantly, I’ll ring her just to spite the bitch …

“The word is historical. Also, the Carpathians are halfway between. I looked them up on the map. But it was the word itself that took my fancy to begin with. ‘This is Leone Eremita, speaking from the Carpathians with the following message for the Vatican and the Kremlin,’ eh? Then I would snap the wire in half and tie a cat to each end and let them yowl in the bastards’ ears! Animal Thénar-dier, two shots, shot to shot.” Then he whispered to Melkior, confidentially, like someone revealing a secret, “This Thénardier fellow is a new species of mammal, they don’t study him in school, but they will. By the way, look how we stretched his left ear for him last night. You can tell the difference at a glance. Did you measure it, Thénardier? It’s as red as a ship’s portside light. For nighttime navigation.”

“Well, you got one across the snout, too.” Thénardier parried with a nervous grimace.

“The Batrachomyomachy. God, how we croaked!”

The sodden, slimy cigarette in his mouth had gone out. He sucked at it in vain. No go.

“Thénardier! Match!”

“At your service, dreaded Pharaoh!” and he lit Maestro’s cigarette with a chamberlain’s submissive gesture. A ritual.

“After ‘Pharaoh’ say, ‘life—health—power,’ you beast! It’s what people said to pharaohs,
‘onkhu—uza —sonbu.’
That’s ancient Egyptian,” he explained to Melkior. “And now begone!” Maestro dismissed Thénardier with a pharaonic gesture.

“Ancient Egyptian! Not surprised, Eustachius? Think I faked it?”

“No, I really wonder how …”

“I used to study it,” Maestro announced boastfully and poured some brandy down his gullet. Opening the gap-toothed mouth, cooling the heated gorge. “They had social poetry, too. The ancient Egyptians, long before the Kharkov school! ‘I saw a smith toiling with hammer at his forge by the fire; his fingers like a crocodile’s, filthy as fish from the Nile.’ Then there’s the one about the cobbler: ‘The cobbler, a wretched fellow, is in truly poor condition,—if he didn’t gnaw his leather he would die of malnutrition.’ I am quoting from memory, in rough translation. And the machinists today, they think they invented everything. The cult of the machine! The pre-posterousness of it! The petrol-fumed inspiration! Their Pegasus a Ford, their Muse, Miss Sonja Henie, the most ridiculous nose in the world! What poetry was ever conceived in an automobile or on-board an aeroplane, that’s what I’d like to know! The mollycoddling of one’s behind! Where were the power shovel and the bulldozer when Cheops was erecting his pyramid, when Pericles was building the Acropolis? When Socrates was making fools of people all over Athens? Tell me, am I overstating it?”