Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (18 page)

“Not at all. Only—”

“All right, say it: Progress! Well, Progress is welcome to pass me by. I’m staying put! Let it rush, let it fly! I, a common biped, walk on my two legs, pleased to feel the Earth beneath my feet, happy to be treading on it, treading on it, treading on it!” and he fell to pounding the floor with his feet, enraged, even hateful, “the damned old bitch that birthed me only to swallow me up again! Using my material to make a pig, a hedgehog, or simply a head of lettuce to be eaten by an overweight woman on a diet. It’s enough to drive you mad! While they fly, they flutter, they are in such a rush. To reach where? Whereto, engineers, locksmiths, mechanics, drivers?”

Maestro spread his arms wide, asking his question around the empty bar room in a kind of despair.

Thénardier, arranging bottles along his altar aided by his two ministrants, tittered hee-hee-hee, savoring his morning fun with pleasure.

“Let’s have the poison, you bloody sophist! And stop smirking!
Margaritas ante porcos,”
he communicated to Melkior, shaking his head resignedly. “It was the likes of him who gave the hemlock to Socrates. And what will they give me? The juice. Electricity. Ho, ho, ho,” Maestro launched into a fit of mad, frenetic laughter. “Power transmission line … ho, ho, ho … at high voltage … ho, ho, ho. Oh yes, at high voltage, right enough. Attention! Mortal danger! And on the pylons, ever see it? They’ve painted the old skull and crossbones, as on a bottle of poison. As at a chemist’s: I would like a pylonful of high voltage please. I have a mind to kill, ho, ho, ho …”

“Nevertheless, mankind has greatly benefited from electricity,” said Melkior mechanically, just to assert his presence. So she did let Ugo … He may have been going home to sleep afterward. He was late going back, he had been with her.

“Mankind? What mankind?” Maestro was aroused in earnest. “There are lots of different mankinds. Were not the ancient Greeks mankind? In what way did Aristotle suffer by having no electricity? He did know about rubbing amber, but he held that in utter contempt. Rubbing indeed. He had more important things to think about than rubbing. Would Dante have written better poetry under a frosted-glass bulb? If Leonardo had needed any electricity he certainly would have set some wheels spinning to get the sparks flying. He built all kinds of machinery, his designs have survived, he’d have found it a cinch to … And yet he painted that perfidious smiling
femina
, heh-heh … Smiling there, the little beast of a female … I have her back at home, a first-class reproduction, you’ll see it when you come by. Ah, you’ve never been to my place, now have you? You’ve definitely got to come by one day … What am I saying, one day? You’ve simply got to come for a bit of peaceful conversation. It’s essential. Only I think you ought to know I have no electricity. High voltage runs outside past my house, a long-distance trans-mis-sion line even, right under my window, with the old oil lamp guttering inside! Ha-ha, how do you like that? I ignore the terrible force coursing past. Be on your way, you potent nonsense, and leave me be, I have no use for you!”

“So, Maestro, do you hate all forms of energy or just electricity?” Maestro seemed to have sensed the irony in the question: he gave Melkior a suspicious look with one eye—the other being filled with a smoke-induced tear—and replied disdainfully:

“I hate nothing. I merely reject the superfluous.”

“And yet you use the electric tram!”

“Never!” flared Maestro, hurt. “I walk a full hour to the office. I walk and think. After all, human thought came into being on the foot. The ancient Greeks thought in the street. The peripatetics walked. As people talk, so they walk—that’s my theory, if you don’t find it off-putting. Let the linguists and … whatever those
experts
are called, hang themselves if they haven’t perceived such a glaring fact. What is speech if not thought? The man whose clogs sink into mud with his every step speaks differently from a man who walks on blacktop. The highlander’s words are as hard as the stone he treads on. Fast walkers are fast speakers; those who drag their feet drag their words as well. The quantities of certain lowlands, the accents of hard, uneven surfaces. Speech has all the relief of the ground underfoot, the tempo of motion in space. The rhythm and the melody of walking. People walk in major or minor key. That’s how they speak, too: brightly or glumly.”

“What about you? Do you walk in major or minor?”

“Minor. Some speeches are gloomy even if they’re about a cheerful subject. I know how I speak. If it were written down you would call it banter. But you’ve got to hear me say it. Which is why I prefer speech to writing. Oral literature.”

“You are a speaker. That, too, is an art form.”

“Because I’m an infantryman. Not in the military sense, of course. Professional soldiers march even as they speak. As for military commands, are they still human speech? You haven’t done your National Service yet, have you? A command consists, my dear sir, of two parts: the preparatory and the executive. Such as ‘Forwarrr … dmarch!’ ‘Dmarch!’ is the executive part. And what is ‘dmarch’? Eh? ‘Forwarrr’ is supposed to stir a special spirit in your bottom; next, ‘dmarch’ gives each soldier a kick in the backside as an initial impulse for getting a move on. Your illustrious behind will go through it in the fullness of time and you’ll remember me then, if for no other reason.”

“Octopus, polyp, cephalopod, vacuum cleaner,” he went on in a kind tone to address Thénardier, who was doing some accounts at the bar, scratching his pelican chin worriedly with a pencil.

“Yes, philosopher Ugly Nose?” responded Thénardier without raising his head from his accounts.

“Listen, you headless cod, raise what you haven’t got when speaking to me. Serve your customers. Shot to shot …”

“No, Maestro. That’s enough for me,” parried Melkior. He had long resolved to get up and was only waiting for a convenient break to flee from Maestro’s thrall. He had to find a phone now, he had to ring Enka. She knows I’m going to ring her. She’s waiting.

“Eustachius the Kind, drop them,” said Maestro all of a sudden, sounding conspiratorial. “You are a man apart.”

“Drop whom?” Melkior pulled free of Enka’s close embrace.

“Them. Ugo and the others. Superficial cads, clowns.” And he went on in a whisper, “As for her, she’ll come crawling to you. She’ll be asking you to mount her, she’ll get down humbly like a hen. I know her. Be a rooster. Head high. Proud.”

“She doesn’t interest me, Maestro. What makes you think I’d …?”

“Come off it, Eustachius! You are consumed by vanity. You keep making comparisons: ‘what’s Ugo got that I …’ And she
is
beautiful.”

“Yes, so she is. But I don’t care whose she may be.”

“You’re lying, Eustachius, but that doesn’t matter. The hell with her. We could find a better place to talk, you and I, somewhere quiet. We are people who still have something to say. What else have we got left but to talk to each other? Setting our thoughts flowing from one head to another, as it were, letting our minds fertilize each other …”

Maestro’s voice quavered with an odd tenderness over the last few words. Melkior did not dare look at his face: it was bound to have on it that humbly pleading look, the painful expression of unrestrained, miserable sincerity as the very words melt in the throat with the pleasure of abasement.

“Don’t frown. Forgive me, Eustachius,” Maestro all but sobbed. “Did I touch some soft spot of yours? Never mind. I can risk it. I no longer have anything to lose—I no longer
have
anything. Even this body’s not mine—I’ve sold my cadaver to the Faculty of Medicine. And drank up the proceeds long ago. I’m a man who has consumed his own dead body—I cannot be bothered by the fine points.”

Then suddenly, as though he had been set aglow by an idea, his eyes took on a weird gleam and a smile—superior, triumphant—spread over his face. There appeared spiteful glee.

“Incidentally, the kind of death that mine will be has not been experienced by anyone, ever! Did you notice my choice of words, Eustachius, ‘to experience death’? Ha-ha, nobody can honestly say, ‘I have experienced death.’ Danton noticed it on the eve of being executed: you can’t say, ‘I was guillotined.’ But forget the guillotine —it’s so ordinary.”

Maestro fell silent and seemed to be musing about something.

“I chose my death long ago, before I sold myself to the Institute of Anatomy. (‘Sold myself’ sounds a bit prostitutional, don’t you think?) That was precisely why I sold myself: because I had chosen. What a death, Eustachius, my boy!” He was waxing ecstatic. “Nobody has ever died that way! So appropriately! So ironically triumphant. Symbolic! So complete!”

“Don’t talk nonsense, Maestro,” Melkior was anxious. “You’re not thinking of killing yourself, are you?”

“Kill myself, he says … Don’t drag me through the mud, Eustachius!” Maestro was seriously offended. “Killing oneself is for abandoned pregnant dames and spotty boys crossed in love. Also, you need equipment to kill yourself. I despise it. Maiming your body is undignified and hideous! And that’s precisely what all the suicides do: they shoot themselves in the head, slash their wrists, throats, bellies, drive knives into their hearts (even nails into their brains!), destroy internal organs using all manner of poisonous slops, drown themselves, fling their bodies from great heights, have them mangled and massacred under the wheels of an engine … Horrifying and disgusting. The vicious criminals! The perverted scum! If they didn’t do it themselves it would be necessary to put them to death for it. And rid life of those damned slaughterers and lunatics.

“No, Eustachius,” Maestro went on in a sentimental tone, “my death is going to be brand-new, medicinally pure, so to speak. No blood, no shit. You’ll see. Only I must start urinating more. Urinating harder, that is. I must switch to beer—it promotes micturition. I must begin exercising right away, ha-ha … Don’t ask questions, Eustachius the Merciful. One day this will all make sense.”

It’s revolting all the same, your medicinal purity, thought Melkior, getting up. He was disgusted by poor Maestro. Unless the man was merely dramatizing some rotten affair of his in which he would like to play a major role? A hoax. He had very nearly fallen for it. Or was it all an exercise in purposely fouling some very intimate purity? No telling what all you can find in a dustbin.

“Are you leaving me, merciful Eustachius?” and Maestro stretched out his arms after him, desperately.

“I must,” Melkior replied briefly, to break free as quickly as possible. “You’re not going upstairs, I hope?” Maestro warned him. “I don’t think the time is yet ripe.”

“No, I’m not. By the way, would you mind passing this review on to the Arts Editor? I’ve got some business to attend to elsewhere, it’s …”

“Sexual?” Maestro chortled with libertine envy. “In thy orisons be all my sins remember’d. Remember thee! Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe!”

Melkior almost ran toward the phone booth. It’s nearly ten! God, what if she’s out? He could not allow being rejected today. The digits were wheeling too slowly on the dial. His impatience was in a hurry to hear her voice, to expunge “the fourth ape this morning” together with that laugh of hers …

“Ambulance Service?” his voice quavered with male excitement.

“Yes, what can I do for you?” It was a man’s voice.

Of course, he’d made a mistake, he’d actually dialed the Ambulance Service, 3 instead of 4. Make the last digit 4, 4, 4!

“Hullo, Ambulance Service?”

“Yes, yesss …” Enka was laughing her familiar laugh, the beckoning one. “How serious is it?”

“Very, Enkie, very serious.” What a relief! He pounced on her voice, he sensed she was naked beneath her housecoat. “Can I come over, Enkie?” He was barely able to say the words.

“When, Kior, when can you come?” She was offering herself to him. “Can you come right now?”

“Right now, Enkie, right now!”

“Come over, Kior. I’m still in bed. I’m waiting for you, you know …”

I know, oh yes I know! Naked, warm … And the tram arrived at just the right moment. The conductor tore off his ticket with a smile. “You’re off then, eh?” his thin moustache was saying.

He let his body hang slackly, holding on to two straps, careless, sailorlike. He had surrendered to the ride.
MEN’S
WEAR
gave him
MEN
SWEAR
.
BOOKING
OFFICE
:
BOO
KING
OFF
ICE
. The booking office hours were part of a poster for
SWAN
LAKE
:
ENKA’S
LAW
, anagrammatically. And what would yield
ENKA’S
BODY
?
O’DYE’S
BANK
?
No, there was no such name as O’Dye. Let’s see.
EBONY
KADS
?
No, it’s c-a-d-s, not k-a-d-s, and she’s Enka, not Enca. Anyway,
kads
or
cads
, it simply did not make sense.

“And what did
you
say?”

“I told him he was an idiot. The one Tolstoy wrote!”

The two girls exploded into laughter, enjoying themselves. The idiot. They were in love with him, both of them. Pretty, scented, dressed for town.

“I’ll go and see it in the theater next week. With him. I told him so.”

“See what?”

“The Idiot.
It’s on this season.”

“I don’t really like Russian plays. They’re all about tramps waxing philosophical …”

“Did you know there’s this play where they say ‘hooker’ on stage?”

“No, actually they say ‘whore,’ ” she replied in a whisper.

“You don’t say. …” They laughed. Saying “whore” on stage was funny. Melkior jumped out before the tram had come to a stop. I expect they like the word. They use it more often than we men. They feel it more intimately. In the second act Leone says, “a common, anonymous whore.”
La grande putana.
Boucher’s azure-and-pink bare-bottoms. Not forgetting Dante—
“donne, ch’avete inteletto d’amore!”
or something—the Aristotelian quintessence of the brothel. The grain of salt in the brain of the animal designated to give pleasure. A modest dose, just enough to avoid insipidity. They then use it to produce—pohoetry! Oho-etryoho-oho-et … oho-oho et …