Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (19 page)

He bounded up the stairs, two steps, three steps at a time, hurriedly, thieflike.

This was how Raskolnikov had climbed toward Alyona’s room, with his axe beneath his coat. No, not like this: Raskolnikov climbed slowly, cautiously, listening for telltale sounds. Incidentally, there were seventy-two steps to climb. Today was the first time he had forgotten to count them. Did this mean something?
ATMAN
would have been able to spin some little meaning out of it. …

The seventy-second step. Coco’s brass nameplate gleamed with hospitable welcome to the old acquaintance and … household friend, he added hesitatingly. M.D., Professor, surgeon … He felt respect before the gravity of the profession. It was she who first called him
Coco
, he hastily said in his own defense at the door. He pressed the bell, long-short-long, a long-arranged Morse
K.
For Kior, as she called him. But the door had been awaiting him impatiently —ajar.

“Kior,” Enka crooned, stretching herself. “Lock it on the inside.” He had already done so, automatically, out of habit.

She was lying in the spacious double bed, her hands under her head, her breasts uncovered as far as the teasing border, in refined style. She was smiling a come-to-me smile.

He threw himself on her as he was, fully dressed …

“Ugh, you’ve been drinking,” she made a grimace of disgust, “brandy!”

“Never mind now, never mind! Enka, Enka …” There was no time for explanations.

“But … take your clothes off … and come to me. Look what I’m like.”

She showed herself to him under the cover, naked. A small, plump, perfect body.

He made an irresistible onslaught. He pushed his way into the bedclothes next to her. He wanted to have her just as he was, fully dressed, out of some sort of spite, because of the morning’s laughter over the phone, because of “the fourth ape.” He wanted to pass off his insult as “mad desire,” as lust’s mindless whim. It flattered her.

“All right then … the shoes at least, the shoes … you madman, you! …” she tittered with glee.

Not even the shoes! Nothing! He had taken full control and was delighting in his superiority. Indeed delighting in it more than in her. There was something vengeful in his lovemaking, as if he were killing her. And she was grateful to him with every finger, every joint; with her nerves, breasts, eyes, mouth, teeth. She bit him on the chin.

“Oww, no!” he mumbled from the softness of the pillow where he had buried his face.

“Priapus! … Priapus! …” she cried out, demented. “It’s a miracle, a miracle! Priapus!”

Suddenly, how strange! he remembered Maestro. “All my sins.” “Thou poor ghost.” And there emerged something disgusting, something slimy. What was that urinating business all about?

And the tempest subsided. All was now reduced to a gentle rhythm of sailing across bobbing waves. Soft rolling in long amplitudes. A marital outing. “Kiooo?!” she called from somewhere inside, below deck, in a panic, as if she were sinking.

He didn’t hear her. What kind of death is he up to? Brand new? Medicinally pure? Can beer kill you?

“Kior, what’s happened?” She had come up on deck, tussle-haired, sweaty.

“Tell me, can beer kill you?”

“God, what a question!” She lifted her arms to her head in astonishment and her small breasts went flat. “Why do you want to know now?”

“What’s wrong with now?” he asked from his pinnacle of power. “Know anything about it? You’re a doctor’s wife after all.”

God, what a life! he complained pleasurably. Why, she’s actually nagging! I have my Viviana (“mine”!), so you needn’t think you can … And her breasts are two buns with a tiny raspberry in the middle. …

“Where were we, Kio?” she asked, nestling up to him.

“At beer being a potential killer.”

It was no longer Maestro on his mind. This was for her benefit: he wanted to show her she could not disturb his train of thought, that his head was in the right place.

“You’re crazy … and a bore!” She turned away from him and furiously lit a cigarette.

He got up. She gasped in horror, the smoke billowing out of her mouth as from a miniature hell. But when she saw him undressing, she put out her cigarette in a conciliatory fashion and clucked in delighted laughter … caw-caw-caw-caw-caw …

“You’re crazy,” she repeated with an unmistakable undertone of great admiration. “A man apart,” was what it meant. The element of surprise. The strategist.

It flattered him. He pulled his legs out of his trousers with the smile of a general heading for an easy victory. Calm; no haste. His innate neatness nearly made him fold them. He threw them across the chair for all its pull. He might change his mind after all, the enemy will ask to be defeated. She’ll be asking me to mount her, she’ll get down like a hen, humbly. Viviana? Just another bird … in the bush.

“Come here, my little sparrow …” he said to her throwing himself carelessly on the bed.

“Small, aren’t I? A teeny-weeny sparrow?” But she was acting more like a little bitch. “You like me for being small? Tell me, Kio! Tell me! You like me? Small, yours, all of me … yours … Kio!”

Desdemona and Cassio … Did they have this kind of thing going? Maestro believes they did, with her, on her. The Venetians. Sweet Desdemona, let us be wary, let us hide our loves! Should I ask her for a handkerchief of Coco’s? He is even now holding somebody’s heart in his hand, up at the clinic. Massaging it, saving a life. “Dear heart,” meaning her, this one here, little Enka, dear heart.

That was how Melkior carried on with her, nose above the deluge. He was able to think, to listen (as he had done recently) to the radio announcing the murder of Trotsky (stabbed in the head with an ice pick), to watch things being quiet in the room. The witnesses. The trousers across the chair, legs splayed, running; the jacket extending a sleeve to reach for a silver fifty-dinar piece lying on the floor, having dropped from a pocket. He had been hurrying after all. He laughed at the sleeve’s fussy-miserly gesture: it would finish by sucking the coin up. A little something for Four Eyes.

“Stop laughing, you tormentor!” Enka managed to surface for an instant and sank into the silt again, as Maestro would have put it.

Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore! But who can ever prove it? Extract a grain of truth from the silt, thou cruel Moor. Would not this one, too, be able to sing the willow tree song tonight? And to die innocent for all the world. And the world is her world. A happy marriage, for all the world, a love match. I love you, you love me … A parasitic opera: ivy all over Shakespeare.

He had his “erotic rheostat” turned on. Those were his words for the resistance he offered his pleasure, the search for disturbing thoughts, the toying with the small, small ones. …

Steady on, children, the world is too small for the lot of you. All right, I expect some room could be found for the little girls … but the little boys? Not so fast, youngsters! Where do you think you’re going? To the barracks? To the wars? Here, look at that eager-beaver little general! Carlo Buonaparte inadvertently sired Napoleon at twenty-three, he was four years my junior. Who knows what hydrocephalic essayist could now be conceived if I were not at the helm? And he laughed dryly: heh, heh.

“You are definitely crazy today!” said Enka crisply, soberly, firmly down on earth.

This third “you’re crazy” was final. She sat up and spitefully began to smooth her hair. He turned on his back without a word. He wore a cold, distant smile. He fell to fingering her vertebrae one by one. She felt it on the tips of his fingers—they were indifferent through satiety. She shook them off with hostility, let go of me. He then suddenly hugged her tight and pressed her down on her back. And took her furiously and candidly, no longer thinking about anything.

They were lying on their backs and sharing a cigarette. She had her head on his bicep, he was toying with her breast: the tiny raspberry had swollen angrily under his teasing. A trivial conversation.

“And why did you laugh that silly laugh?”

“Offended are we? It’s how I always act … when he’s in.”

“Not to mention ‘the fourth ape this morning’ …
I’m
that fourth ape! You purposely said it with the phone still on, you wanted me to hear I was the fourth ape.”

“I wanted
him
to see …”

“To see what? That I’m an ape? I can see that myself.”

“To see that I was speaking without hanging up first, that I didn’t care if he heard what I said …”

“That you didn’t care if he heard, or rather if I heard, that I was an ape?”

“Not you, he.”

“The ‘he’ is me.”

“Not at all. I wanted
him
, Coco, to hear …”

“That I’m an ape? You could have hung up, he would’ve heard you anyway. But then
I
wouldn’t have!”

“Oh, you’re horrible! You’ve got me all confused … You
are
an ape!” She was angry. “He’s my husband! He’s a man doing a serious job and I don’t propose to torment him with suspicions. Human lives depend on him, he must have inner peace. I love him and respect him. Don’t laugh, you demon, I do love him. He’s a nice man, hard-working and intelligent.”

“And you love and respect him. My God, what a lucky man he is!”

“He is indeed! And you can shove your cynicism. Ours is a happy marriage.”

“A love match.”

“It’s too much for your piggy little mind to grasp, isn’t it? I wouldn’t give up this happiness for anything in the world! His happiness! And his contentment, his peace of mind. If for no other reason than because—and I know you’ll give another of your ape grins at this—because I like people and you despise them. One twitch of his hand could mean the end of someone’s life. And what harm could your scribbling do? Getting a beating, like the one that … that actor was going to give you. Everyone respects him. I’m honored to be his wife.”

Hell and damnation, she means it! She does believe it all, this Iagoan Desdemona! Now what do you make of it? Come on, psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, endocrinologists, criminologists, sophists, sadists, casuists, Jesuits, diplomats, gnostics, mystics, dialecticians, occultists, moralists, veterinarians, dustmen, firemen … what do you make of it? Oh great
ATMAN
, you know what to make of it. You … and Shakespeare! Of that mental ileus, that Luciferian theology, that whorish moral science, that garbage salad, that sweetmeat made from one’s own intestinal content. “Her honor is an essence that’s not seen; they have it very oft that have it not.”

He repeated the quotation aloud.

“What was that?” she said suspiciously.

“Shakespeare. Iago talking to Othello about Desdemona.”

“I get it,” she said angrily. “It means I have no honor. You could have been a bit more decent about it.”

He laughed from deep inside his lungs, a forced, nervous laugh. This was the moment to slap her face and put an end to the whole affair. But he knew he would regret it the very next day. Not on her account; on his own. He needed her just as she was, paradoxical, mendacious, gifted for corruption of any kind. She provided him with an excuse for his lost state, with a kind of dirty bath for his leprous feeling. The leper. Pile on the filth all around! Oh, to get lost in dirt like a revolting insect living in dung. Maestro: the Crazy Bug.

And yet he was disgusted with Maestro the Bug.

He knew he was lying. It was all an exercise in mimicry performed by a mind horrified at the quicksands into which it was about to be pushed. And the mind was unable to flee, still believing this was a dream, a bad, terrible, infantile dream involving monsters with two pincerlike fingers for hands approaching to embrace you—“I’m your Daddy, my boy.” And when his mind awoke to a new day it found it simply unbelievable that people might not walk the streets so privately, that the crippled weighing-machine man might not slurp soup from his lunch bucket in the doorway at noon, that news vendors might not shout “War’s Worst Raid On London.” That someone down in the street might say in dead earnest, “This is no exercise, this is the real thing. I heard it with my own ears over the wireless.” And what of that mountain whiteness of the sanitarium for innocent diseases then, what of the dreams under the shelter of the melancholy white flag with the magic red cross on it, above which, high up among the clouds, pilots smiled like angels? Milk brothers and sisters, reclining on the terrace under the glaciers, thermometer under tongue, leafing through breviaries of love in postprandial contemplations. She is now Viviana. Not Francesca, not Beatrice or Laura or Isolde or Héloïse or Virginie; she is Viviana, a name which …

“What have you gone all quiet for?” called Enka in a conciliatory voice.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Abélard. A castrated man in the Middle Ages.”

“Did he do it out of piety?”

“No, they did it to him. The Church. For being in love with young Héloïse.”

“Would you go through that for me? Like hell you would!” She was actually seriously offended at the conclusion.

“I don’t love you,” he said, blowing away a strand of her hair that was tickling his nose.

“No?”

“No.”

She shooed his hand from her breast and got up irresolutely. She put her housecoat back on and went wordlessly to the bathroom.

That was how their encounters usually ended, to his satisfaction. He actually stage-managed such endings, closing the door behind him with no wish ever to return. And walking downstairs happy to be leaving. As if he were redeeming himself for some piece of perfidy.

He felt the wish to flee. To profit from her absence and go.

He dressed hastily. Prowling about on tiptoe, he tried to walk soundlessly, burglar style. But the parquet creaked. Suddenly she opened the door and gave him a frightened stare, as if about to shout for help. He stopped in his tracks, taken aback. He bent down like someone looking for something he’d mislaid.

“What is it you lost—your honor?” she collected her wits. Rage poured from her eyes.

“Yes. But I expect it must be somewhere in your marital bed,” he leered cynically. “Never mind, I’ll take yours. It’ll come in handy—I’m seeing some scoundrels later on today.”