Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (22 page)

And I still don’t know her … Viviana’s … name. Now she’s Fredegonde on top of all else! Oh Lord, what
is
the matter with me?

You’re in a bad way all right, replied the Lord.

“Hey, Parampion, tell me,” he asked hesitatingly, “who is that woman?”

“A mystery woman!” said Ugo seriously. “Like any other. Perhaps even …” He did not want to finish. “Here comes my tram. Kalisto ringing for lunch. Tired. See you at the Give’nTake tonight,” he added from the tram step.

“Perhaps even” what? A mystery woman. He seems to have a way with these mystery women. All sorts of thing can lurk there. Various possibilities. Anything is possible. Nothing is ruled out. Not under the rules. Under rule. Under their rule. Like the fragrance of spring’s breath they pass by; that is how it all begins. Like a bolt of lightning they strike our nerves, batter us, roll us, cut us up, cook us, soften us. We spread ourselves docilely, mushlike, jamlike, over their whims. As long as the whims last. Then they get us unstuck, scrape us off, clean it all out, every last bit, so as not to leave behind a single crumb of “the past,” so as to consign all to utter and eternal oblivion.

They course through our veins like poison—a melancholy, moody flow. We yearn for an ending, any ending, for a finality, any finality, for somewhere to stop, to lie down peacefully, on our backs, to watch the branches sway with the wind, to help the ants in their small lives. We shamble like sick dogs along the fences of the happiness of other people, other people’s laughter. We give an occasional bark alone in the night. We watch warily, cross-eyed, both sides of life, we are careful. Poisoned. Crippled by missing the warmth of touch, the fragrance of flowers, by missing springtimes, mornings, awakenings, the meaning of walking, of motion …

Where to? Poisoned. Poisoned. Poisoned.

And then … we take them like a shot of cognac at the bar, hastily, in from the cold, strangers, aloof, accidental passengers through all those distant, random, other people’s lives. Indifferent. Locked. Cynical. That is the end.

Oh Maestro, you rhapsody of filth!

And yet he is making for the Café, hoping unconsciously … No! Hoping consciously, indeed aspiring, to meet her. To find out, somehow to read in her person “the night before” … and all the rest of love’s hieroglyphs inscribed on her by all the various pharaohs in all the nights of her dirty history. Damned Sphinx!

“Perhaps even …” Perhaps even a whore, is what he wanted to say? Ugo knows something about her, something nasty, something you don’t tell about the woman whom you … whom you … whom you … he kept repeating in his mind while his thoughts floundered elsewhere, enraged, mad. Is she … that kind of woman? Or did he mean something else? She doesn’t work for a living, what does she live on? Gentlemen friends? But if she’s not
that
kind of woman, if she isn’t a … Oh, Manon! Yet another name for her.

He was approaching the Café. There were guests on the terrace, loud, vivacious. Having preprandial cognacs. Journalists. Waiting for proofs of their papers. In one of the groups, Maestro, mind-blowingly drunk, reciting “I have been on a cloud o’er the sea …”

She’s not there. She’s not inside either. Now then … Now then, the thing to do is abandon my self. Leave it here in the Café to wait for her. While I go to … go to … Go where, miserable, alone, without my self? But I’ll find her! I’ve got to see her today, have to think of a way …

He realized he was singing nonsense in his head. What sorrow! To sing my sorrow. Or to have lunch? He felt hunger in his entire body. It was Enka’s doing. All your doing, baby, billing and cooing, baby. Maybe. Then, to his body: No way. You’re not getting anything to eat, not as long as the reason’s valid, and I want you to remember it. Be patient and … disintegrate, melt into air, into thin air. I let you have a sausage at Kurt’s last night, didn’t I? I’m speaking to you as if you were a dog. Forgive me, poor body. The fault is not thine. The fault is not mine. You know,
bud
, Pechárek’sh going to eat ush up if we gain weight. Off to the barracksh with you, he’ll shay. And den to Hishtory’zh cauldron where the fate of dish faderland izh being cooked.

Those words aroused reflexes in the stomach. It gave an angry rumble. Don’t be a fool, stomach, we’re in danger! What if someone heard you? They would say, Poor father, such a willful child! Did Pestalozzi live in vain? Moderation, moderation, as the Greeks taught. Epicurus, you say? He was not referring to food only! And you do get “the rest,” according to your just desserts. Be a Stoic. Renunciation, my boy, that’s the yardstick of true greatness. Dom Kuzma was a giant of a man, sobbed Melkior-the-body, and look at him now! What do you think you’re doing? Taking you to be weighed, that’s what I’m doing, you greedy bastard! You’ll be the death of me yet! replied Melkior-the-mind and resolutely led his beast to the invalid’s weighing machine.

The man was holding a pot between his knees and using his spoon to dunk the bits of bread he had dropped into his soup. Sitting beside him on the small bench was an old woman with a basket: the other pot contained meat and potatoes fried with onions. There was a smell of food. Melkior’s stomach reared in anger, only to subside into hopeless whimpers like a puppy being punished.

When Melkior stepped onto the machine the old woman stood up to attend to him. The invalid didn’t even look up.
Tant mieux.
He was slurping his soup with gusto and … leave me be.

“Sixty-two,” pronounced the old woman in a businesslike, even mildly unpleasant tone, having cursorily read Melkior’s weight from the calibrating bar.

“You didn’t round it off, did you? That was a bit quick.”

“No haste, no rounding off!” said the old woman sharply, so much so that the invalid looked up, ready to defend the quality of his service. “That’s what it showed, no two ways about it!”

The invalid nodded with satisfaction and went back to his meal. Approving of his wife’s resoluteness.

“But I couldn’t have gained that much overnight, could I?” I’m turning into a Dom Kuzma, noted Melkior, and he felt something akin to shame.

“You can put on up to eight hundred grams, you know,” said the invalid with professional patience through a sizeable bite he was pleasurably preparing in his filled-to-capacity mouth. “You’re forgetting the eating, sir. You have dinner, you have lunch, well, it all adds up, and the machine only shows your weight, whatever the freight.”

There it was, the “freight-weight” again. The firm’s slogan.

He paid and went down the street, worrying. Say what you like, I would have to weigh less following the simplest bookkeeping logic. There have been outlays, damn it! fumed the unhappy proprietor of a fresh two hundred and forty grams. And no receipts at all, no dinner or lunch, no food or drink.

Lunch, dinner: what pedestrian explanations. No, no, there is definitely a mystery to this weight business, a whim of physics. Exactitude? Exactitude my foot! There are deviations, exceptions, paradoxes, in the laws of physics. Water gains volume by freezing, said Melkior, triumphing over physics. He tried to recall another example. In vain. Perhaps there
is
no other. After all, weight is gravity. Newton’s law: mass attraction. Does the Earth attract me more strongly today as a result? The mass of Melkior Tresić is today drawn more strongly to the mass of the Earth, if you please. By two hundred and forty grams. Exactly. On the other hand, mightn’t the Earth have gained weight from some sort of cosmic nourishment and consequently exerted a greater pull? Who knows what stellar spaces Mother Earth traipses about in, what galactic feasts she fattens at. Finally to descend, having eaten and drunk her fill, to attract my underfed self. Will you just look at her? Metamorphoses!

A new law on the invalid’s machine: Earth attracts the starving body of Melkior Tresić with a force that is directly proportional to his army weight and inversely proportional to his resistance. The war being W, a constant. Constantina.

Constance! Could that be Viviana’s true name? He subsequently found he liked the meaning of the word very much. More so than the word itself. An ugly name, really, but its heart was in the right place …

He walked with a queer feeling of weight inside. This was a disruption to his ever-scrupulously-tidy mind. It was as if someone had brought a foreign piece of furniture into his familiar, private domestic realm of peace. Apparently he couldn’t accommodate, he couldn’t accept the change without frowning and resisting. Normally, when he was left alone with himself he was able to resume his train of thought as if it were an interrupted game of chess, with the situation precisely defined; but now somebody had been tampering with the chess pieces, changing their positions, leaving a muddle behind. … He could not abide disorder. Everything inside and around him had to be in its place. Defined, arranged to a certain logic, a system of his for classifying things by value, importance—a subjective, ridiculous hierarchy that made no crucial, objective sense. But it was so important to him that he was apt to climb back up to his third floor just to take out a book and put it “in its proper place” because … There was no because, it simply had to be that way for some reason he couldn’t explain.

This is a stain of some sort of poison spreading inside me. It’s a stain … I wasn’t wary enough to take care, to take care. It’s Enka’s lust that has overflowed over, over … what? He was climbing the stairs to his room to the accompaniment of such faux musings. Everything was unclean, everything insincere! Including the autumn with its faux sky, faux heat, with its greenery tired and withered like the face of old age done up with cosmetics. There were supposed to be rains, sad, autumnal, and yellow leaves in the parks and the sound of wind in the trees, the days gray and gloomy, the nights long and wet and monotonous. Verlaine.
Les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne …
A surrender to sorrows, a relaxation, ease. Instead, this is all tense expectation outside the operating theater. Inside, the mystery of the to-be-or-not-to-be alternatives is under way. It’s no longer a question, my good prince, it’s a matter of waiting. The only question is: When? When will the blood-stained surgeon slice into my navel and reconnect me to Mother Earth who exerts this gravitational pull on me out of love? But I take away her force. I foster my antigravity using ascetic, saintly, angelical means. Wings will sprout out of my anti-Earth and I will take off for the disinterested, neutral, suprapatriotic, suprahuman skies. I shall hitch myself to a cloud and swing above you,
Mère-Folle
, I, your crazy son, Melkior Tresić the spider.

“Ah! Hail-fellow-well-met!”
ATMAN
surprised him on the stairs. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Adam?” Melkior spoke like someone ambushed by a loan shark.

“She’s here,” whispered Mr. Adam straight into his ear, so that the vowels tickled him deep inside his Eustachian tube.

“She’s in here, in my room,” whispered
ATMAN
confidentially, as if making preparations for a murder.

“Yes? What have I got to do with …?” But these were not words turned over in the mind in advance, it was just the tongue knitting a small mask for the palmist’s benefit.

“I promised to invite you when she came by, did I not? Well, she has come. Unexpectedly. I’ve already been upstairs looking for you, in your room.”

The palmist spoke with elation, as one speaks of an extraordinarily joyous event. He had the air of a man exalted and aquiver. Nervously interlacing his long white fingers, he was making small bows to Melkior like a shop assistant enjoining a window-shopper to step in and have a closer look at the merchandise.

“Won’t you come in, Mr. Melkior? We have been waiting for you.”

“But why? She’s
your
guest, isn’t she?” In fact, he was afraid. Trembling at the very thought that he did wish to go in and was actually going to go in at any moment now. Oedipus facing the Sphinx! But he knew the answer to the riddle, “What animal walks on four feet … on two feet … on three feet …”

“I don’t think we ought to put this off any longer.”
ATMAN
was already nudging him toward the door. “Whatever will she think we’re doing out here?”

The room was spacious.
ATMAN
had divided it, using a plush double curtain, into a dark anteroom-cum-waiting-room and a studio, which doubled as his bedroom. Melkior stepped into the dark and put out his arms like a blind man.
ATMAN
was still guiding him by the arm—or rather holding him captive.

“Would you believe he’s afraid of you?” he called through the curtain to her over there in the well-lit part of the room. She shrieked a little laugh, which meant nothing, or merely, “How amusing.”

The palmist pushed the curtain aside and ushered Melkior into the room. She had clearly taken up a pose for the encounter: she was sitting crossways on the sofa, her legs out in front of her, a thick volume on her knees. Melkior recognized it as a book of his—a translation of Alfred Adler’s
Individual Psychology;
ATMAN
used its size to impress his customers.

“Here he is,” the palmist said as he set Melkior before her like a wooden dummy. “Introduce yourselves.”

In reply to his
Tresić
she mumbled out some name or other and immediately said with genuine modesty:

“I should be afraid of you—you’re a critic.”

“You have nothing to be afraid of,” Melkior replied with conviction.

“That’s right, is it not? Nothing!”
ATMAN
jumped with delight. “And let me tell you he’s not just being flattering!”

The corners of her lips curled upward with pleasure. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful … the words were dripping sweetly inside Melkior like honey being poured out golden-transparent, slowly, long, lazily. She had spread her skirt peacocklike about herself on the sofa so that her waist in the high-necked tight pullover showed itself slim, narrow, and the breasts, large, round, jutted out proudly, self-confident. The hair light brown, slick, drawn into a chignon, two thin laughter lines—that’s what makes her look older. But the eyes, the mouth, the chin … no, I’ll never be kissing them, concluded Melkior and this gave him a sense of inner peace, a resigned satisfaction.