Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (31 page)

“I think my concert’s over, too,” said Pupo in a near-whisper, glancing at his watch. “Some in the audience are quite musical. I’ll go, you stay. I’ll call on you tomorrow. How long will you be in?”

“Until nine, without fail.”

Pupo took his hand and gave it two hard squeezes without a word.

Businesslike. He had clinched a deal.

Expeditious, practical, cold. He was left there like a girl deceived. Call you tomorrow—the time-honored telegraphic goodbye after a tryst. That was how he customarily took leave of Enka—I’ll call you—and regretted it afterwards, in the street. Some other words were called for, after all, but he would always store them away “for later.” Then it would be another
I’ll call you
, he would again see the disappointment in her eyes but he was unable to tell her anything else, anything binding, committing, anything with a promise of a closer liaison. Let’s make it quite clear: this thing between us has gone as deep as it ever will. No tears, please. So it was with Enka. The polyvalent element, capable of forming many amorous bondings.

As for Pupo … Melkior felt he was retreating after a failed attempt at conquest. The conquest of Viviana. He was now accepting a comparison he had rejected as being out of place. As, hah, one unworthy … of Pupo. Where am I to spend the rest of this miserable evening? He began rummaging among the options. The Give’nTake he threw the farthest away. Home? … and find
ATMAN
lying in ambush on his landing to see the flower from this afternoon’s garden. Ring Enka? Perhaps Coco was on night duty … in the morgue, with the heart which had died that morning in hand … like a canary. That option he also … eliminated, cautiously. He knew he was going to wander off somewhere following his footsteps, pining for Viviana. A quiet place with well-behaved waiters. There’ll have to be poetry whispered …
October’s gentle breath.
He smiled, but sweetened the bitterness using Ugo’s tra-la-la-tra-la-la sonnet. With well-behaved waiters? The neon letters of the different Café signs lit up in turns. But he kept wrestling with the Give’nTake. Leave me alone, damn you! Like the shadow of a huge vulture the Give’nTake kept flying over the sweet flickering of Viviana’s name in a distant darkness. The thing to do would be to explore all the dark recesses of this night, strain the ocean to catch the plankton glowing in those two … Vivianic eyes. What was now the use of this entire superfluous night-cloaked space? The thing to do was walk all over the night, from end to end, peer into every dark corner, interrogate every owl, nighthawk, mouse, cat, whore, and thief, walk from bark to bark down to the farthest reaches of the night … Oh, where did they hide her?
Gilda! Pietà, signori, prego Pietà.
And tomorrow morning Duke Ugo would burst into song
questa o quella per me pari sono …
Tears welled in his eyes … and he let them flow. In the dense darkness of an old doorway Melkior succumbed to sobs. Oh God how unhappy I am!

“You and I both,” responded the darkness with a sigh. Embarrassment lashed Melkior. He turned toward the darkness enraged, irate:

“Who’s there?” he bellowed into the dark. “Speak up! Who are you?”

“Go ahead, sir, hit me.” Creeping toward him was something four-legged, crawling, down on the ground, on the uneven tiles, rattling huge hooves, armor, fearful machinery. A talking turtle.

“I’m down here, sir, at your feet,” grunted the being on the floor.

“What do you want?”

“You could help me without undue trouble to yourself.”

“Where are you? Stand up. Who are you?”

“Half a man, that’s my name … and my entire biography.”

“Are you drunk? Rolling on the ground like that?”

“I’m not rolling on the ground. I have no legs,” enunciated the man in a low, penitently shamed voice, like someone making a terrible avowal.

Melkior was horrified. He bent over pointlessly with the naïve intention of lifting the man, getting him to stand up straight, restoring his dignity. To stand him up on what? To elevate him to what dignity?

“What can I do for you then?” he asked politely.

“I didn’t tell you that to make you change your tone,” said the legless man with some arrogance. “You can go on despising me if you like. What I have in mind is nothing to do with that kind of mercy. I need your help in a specific matter, that’s all.”

“In what matter?”

“The stairs are too high for me to climb—my legs are cut off almost at the hip …”

“And you want me to …? But can’t you use your arms?”

“I could, but the steps are wooden, there would be the rattle of my hooves and the rest of my harness. She would recognize it. I walk about the house on all fours, she’s familiar with the sound. I say she—I mean my wife. I’m sure you’ll have guessed it by now, I might as well empty out the sack of my misfortune: she’s upstairs in a man’s flat. Her lover’s,” he added in pain.

“Are you sure?” Melkior felt like breaking into a kind of laughter.

“I’ve been lying in wait for her, here in the dark. She’s just walked in.”

“So what do you propose to do upstairs? Strangle her?”

“I couldn’t reach her neck,” the legless man joked grimly. “No, it’s nothing of the kind,” he went on in a serious tone. “I want you to help me upstairs without making a sound. His door is right at the top of the staircase. You needn’t feel any revulsion about touching me, in terms of cleanliness I mean. I’m clean, for all that I crawl along on the ground. She takes care of me, keeps me clean and neat. I’m an intellectual and a man of taste. I’m not poor either. I’m even wearing a new suit—half a suit, that is—complete with white shirt and a tie. You can’t see it in the dark, but you can take my word for it.”

“I believe you,” muttered Melkior. He was already feeling the urge to turn around and run for it. “Why are you going upstairs?”

“To listen in,” the legless man said greedily. “I want to hear her love, frank and true. I’ve never experienced that nor ever will … do you get my drift? I fear it’s not easy to explain to you people up there, you who are upstanding and whole. But I had a hope when I heard you. … Forgive me if it sounds offensive, but I said to myself, This one just might …”

“But you’d suffer all the worse when you hear them …”

“No, no, not at all!” the legless man interrupted instantly. “Try to put yourself in the position of half a man such as myself who loves a complete and quite shapely woman, a woman neither old nor ugly. I’ve no time to explain why she married me—it’s a long story. The point is, she’s my wife, a girl who married me for love. For my love of course. Because her love is something different, something that will never really blend, combine, commingle with mine. It will never fuse with mine into a single amorous entity which would completely engulf (after all, how could it, with me?) our separate selves, so that you could not tell the one from …”

“That, my dear fellow, never happens with any woman’s love,” muttered Melkior knowledgeably.

“Oh come on now! For an instant at least, for a brief moment of total self oblivion! That’s what I’m after. To hear her call to him, say his name … see? … speak that name with a wild yearning for union, melting, vanishing. That’s what I want to hear from her!”

“With another man?”

“What of it—she’s mine!” the poor man protested in surprise. “Don’t I myself sometimes get carried away by a piece of music, so much so that it’s a kind of mental orgasm (I’m very fond of music); well, couldn’t I, too, experience orgasm with another? With music, that is, in this case? And am I not then in a more exalted mode of being, a finer one, as it were? I’m talking about qualities, not about a commonplace (indeed a common) activity. It’s nothing to do with me, I don’t even think about it. When I listen to the violin in a Beethoven concerto (say the one in D major) do I think about a horse’s tail scraping upon sheep’s gut? I know those are the means, the
indispensable
means, for providing these wonderful harmonies, but it’s the harmonies that excite me, not the guts. But let’s face it, the guts
are
necessary. The guts of an anonymous sheep, at that. And the tail of some stupid nag—which indeed may not have been stupid at all, but that’s beside the point. Why should I be thinking about the horse upstairs (who for all I know may not literally be a horse), about the tails and bowels, about the scrapings and blowings and … the dirty business in general, if I want to listen to the love cantilena of a violin that has never sounded properly in my arms? All it has ever done was scrape, scrape, scrape … producing no music, that’s my stinking lot! I’m not a player, whereas he may even be a virtuoso. It takes an entire body, an entire man—which I am not. There you are, the tail and the guts are a must after all. … Am I to hate Menuhin for it?”

The man ardently delivered his entire, long-in-the-making, carefully prepared argument and fell silent. He was tired. This was perhaps the first time he had shared it with someone, with a stranger in a dark doorway, under bizarre circumstances, and was now embarrassed. Perhaps this was the first time he had doubted it, its validity, its viability in the cold world of other people’s indifference?

“You’re laughing, aren’t you?” the man spoke up from the nether darkness. “You think I worked it all out down here like a sapient reptile slithering on the ground? Or evolved a new organ for my miserable existence? Or that this is a whole new, my very own, indeed original brand of generosity? No, I’m as selfish as you, as any
normal
male. (He put a very heavy stress on
normal
). It’s out of selfishness that I’m telling you all this.”

“No, you’re not being selfish,” said Melkior without conviction, just to say something.

“Because I’m not snarling at
that business
up there? Why, I pine for that business up there with all my supracanine faith in absolute love. I want love, do you understand what I’m saying, love, not gnaw a bone on the ground in this dark doorway!”

An outcry de profundis. Melkior shuddered. Inside him vibrated muffled affinities with this pathetic ground-bound being who had raised high a huge sky above his head and planted in it a single star in which he had inscribed his destiny. The sky above … and Viviana shining in it. Matter of fact, my dear groundling, our love’s sky is a common or garden skirt at whose zenith twinkles a stubbornly chosen … all right, call it a star … That’s our destiny.

“You’ll help me upstairs then?” the legless man asked uncertainly.

Well, what do you know, the man won’t give it up. He wants his cantilena. All right, have it your own way.

“Of course I will. Come on.”

“Get hold of me from the back, under the armpits,” the man instructed him briskly, with a kind of joy. He even raised his arms, as if about to take off. Melkior took hold of him like someone teaching a small child to walk and brought him to the staircase. They had just begun to climb, barely clearing the first step or two, when a door upstairs opened and there was the sound of voices. Serious, grave voices.

“It’s her! Something’s wrong,” the man whispered, terrified. “Run for it, run! As far as you can!” He was hurrying Melkior as if some dreadful anger were threatening.

“I can’t just leave you on the stairs.”

“Then dump me behind the door and run!” the man cried in frightful panic. “All’s lost! God, I’m so unhappy!”

Melkior grabbed him hurriedly and carried him back to the doorway. He set him down piously behind the door like a broken saint, whispered “goodbye” and fled outside.

But did not go far. Let’s see the violin after all. He positioned himself well, facing a shop window that had a mirror set diagonally in it. He did not have long to wait. Out of the door came an indeed well-built young woman with a very pretty face. But when she stepped onto the pavement Melkior noticed the floating motion of her somehow fetching lameness. With one leg she barely touched the ground in a weightless, fairylike hover; with the other she trod firmly, with all her well-endowed corporeality. As a counterpoint.

Oh, what an instrument! sighed Melkior. Hence the ardent wish for a virtuoso upstairs. He thought of the luckless torso behind the door. Oh poor church-portal saint, not even Johann Sebastian himself could have played your life in a more charming counterpoint.

And now, where to? All the roads are blocked by heavy drifts of uncertainty. The thing to do would be to proceed from some starting point under this nocturnal star-riddled dome. Following what star? Every star is the beginning of some motion … Every thought is a star from an undiscovered constellation drowned in the infinity of time. The infinities. The conceptual confidence tricks. The metaphors. The fearful astronomy above the life of a small carnivore rolled up in a ball of yearning under his little sky of a crinoline atop which shines … Viviana. This was his destiny.
Stella Viviana.
And he set off, following his lost star, to wander vainly in the night.

Far off in town the cathedral clock tolls the hours. Five o’clock. But night is still strangling the city with damp and cold darkness. The long autumn night. He was freezing in the deserted arbored walk under the tall vaults of withered leaves rustling fearfully on weary trunks. He winced at the roaring of lions. The sound of the zoological tyrant’s voice drew responses from other animals, jerked awake from fearful sleep. The emperor was hungering for their flesh.

Melkior smelled the stench of the zoo. The warm furs were unrolling, the beasts were stretching, opening their jaws wide, yawning, roaring into the new day. Zoopolis was waking. And broadcasting the stench of its slavery.

This would be what prisons and barracks stink like. The
katorgas.
The hordes, legions, cohorts, regiments. The glorious armies that gave epochs their peculiar smells. The large-scale collective fumes, the stenches of history. Stenches Persian, stenches Alexandrine, stenches Hannibalic, stenches Caesarean, stenches Avaran, Hunnish, Tartar, Mongolian, Germanic, stenches Turkish, stenches Napoleonic, stenches Samuraic, stenches Prussian, Franz-Josephinian, Benito-Mussolinian, and stenches Adolf-Hitleran … Stenches and more stenches, as far as history reaches. Mankind has well and truly made a stink of it in troop and bowel movements. Ptui! Melkior spat on the animal stench with which history had invaded his nostrils from the zoo.